A case for conscience

It was announced the other day (22nd April) that the Solicitor-General would not be permitted to prosecute Trudi Warner for contempt of court, on the grounds that she had held up a placard outside a crown court where Insulate Britain protesters were on trial, reminding jurors that they had a right to acquit defendants on their conscience, i.e. to acquit despite the fact that the elements of an offence had been made out. You can find the full judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Saini, here; it’s good reading.

Before the judgment came out, Matthew Scott offered some thoughtful comments on the case in a post headed “I don’t stand with Trudi Warner”. Matthew argued that, while it was certainly a fact that juries sometimes decided cases on the basis of conscience and faced no adverse consequences for doing so, this did not amount to their having a right to do so. In this Matthew followed the case made on behalf of the Solicitor-General, which (quoting the skeleton argument) asserted that

[juries have] a de facto power to acquit a defendant regardless of judicial directions, because they cannot be directed to convict and they cannot be punished for acquitting on conscientious grounds, but they have no right to do so

In support of this argument, Matthew pointed out that juries can decide cases on the basis of a complete misreading of the law, and do so with impunity (as long as they haven’t told the judge of their reasoning beforehand) – and yet it would plainly be contempt of court to encourage them to do so. They can do it (power), but they shouldn’t (no right).

This is a difficult – even contradictory – area, but I’m afraid this reasoning just confuses things even more, tending as it does to reduce ‘right’ to a kind of legal garnish on top of a power to do something. A better approach is to go back to Wesley Hohfeld’s decomposition of the concept of ‘right’. Hohfeld argued that what we call legal rights come in many different varieties, but that all of them involve a relationship between two parties. Suppose, firstly, that you have a legal duty to somebody – your employer, say; in that situation it’s also true that your employer has a claim on you. It’s important to note, before going any further, that the claim and the duty aren’t two separate things which complement each other. Rather, they’re two perspectives on the same thing: if you have a legal duty to person X to do A (e.g. work 35 hours a week), it necessarily is the case that person X has a legal claim on you obliging you to do A; it’s not possible for a valid legal claim to cover a different scope from its corresponding legal duty, or vice versa. Outside of your specified duty, moreover, your employer has no right to demand that you also do B or C, e.g. give up smoking; this also means that you have a privilege, relative to your employer, of being under no obligation to do that thing.

All of these are, in effect, spun out from the concept of a claim: a “no right” is the absence of a claim, a privilege is the absence of a duty. All these relationships obtain between two parties, and they all relate to a particular area of activity; they’re all about saying that person Z is bound to do A or is not bound to do B, by virtue of their relationship with person Y. Sometimes what we call a ‘right’ is based on a claim (under the terms of our relationship with person A, we have a right to expect that they will do X); sometimes it’s based on a privilege (we have a right to do Y, irrespective of our relationship with person B).

That’s part 1 of Hohfeld’s table of rights, and you may be wondering what any of it’s got to do with juries. Not a great deal, I’m afraid, but it’s worth setting it out as background to part 2, which would otherwise seem impossibly abstract. The table needs a part 2 because the areas of activity regulated by law include the processes of law itself: we all have rights to associate freely and duties to pay taxes, but some people also have the duty to carry out community service or the right to charge another person with a crime. What is at issue here is not claims and duties per se, but the claim to change another person’s duties and privileges on one hand, and the duty to submit to this on the other. These second-level rights and duties don’t quite fit into the first half of the table.

To complete the picture, Hohfeld proposed that in some situations we have the power to alter another person’s legal position, their effective constellation of duties and privileges: examples would include a police officer placing someone under arrest or a jury (finally!) deciding that a person is guilty as charged. This power, viewed from the other end of the relationship, is a liability to have one’s legal position changed. As with claims and duties or no-rights and privileges, the power and the liability aren’t complementary but simply two views of the same thing: to say that a power exists is also to say that the corresponding liability exists, and vice versa. We can now complete the table by adding the two negative terms: the absence of a power – the lack of a power to alter someone’s legal position – is a disability, while the absence of a liability is an immunity.

It’s worth lingering over this last term briefly, as immunities are vitally important in putting Hohfeld’s schema to work. To say that we have an immunity is to say that we are in a relationship with another party, under the terms of which that party has no power to change our legal position (i.e. they have a disability). (All powers/liabilities, and hence all immunities/disabilities, have defined limits, so strictly speaking that sentence should read “…an immunity in a specific area … no power to change our legal position in that specific area (i.e. they have a disability relative to that specific area)”. But I thought the sentence was quite long enough as it was.) Look at it this way: if the party on whom you’re making a claim has the power to change the terms of your relationship, then they can change it such that you don’t have a claim on them any more. A claim backed by an immunity is a claim that the other party can’t, legally, refuse to honour.

Nearly there. I said above that what we call a ‘right’ is generally ‘based on’ a claim or a privilege. I can complete that statement now: what we call a ‘right’ is generally one of three things, consisting of a claim, a privilege or a power, combined in each case with an immunity. A right such as the right to vote or to receive free healthcare is a claim on other people (in these cases, on the government) together with an immunity – which is to say, a disability on the part of those other people: they cannot, legally, refuse to honour the claim. A right such as the right to assemble or to join a union is a privilege – the absence of any duty not to do those things – bundled together with an immunity, meaning that if you do do those things you won’t be penalised for it. Lastly, a police officer’s right to put you under arrest, or a jury’s right to send you to prison, is a power together with an immunity – which is to say, a disability on your part to change the terms of that relationship, such that you won’t be arrested or convicted.

Now, back to Trudi Warner and the information that she was providing to potential jurors. As we’ve seen, the Solicitor-General argued that juries have a ‘power’ to decide cases according to conscience but no ‘right’ to do so. I think we can do better than that. Translating the S.-G.’s argument into more consistently Hohfeldian terms, the case is, firstly, that juries have a power to decide a case according to conscience, and an immunity to being discharged or having their decision overruled in consequence; secondly, that they have very much the same power+immunity to decide a case purely on the basis of personal sympathies (or on any other basis, including tossing a coin); and, thirdly, that this is significantly different from having a “right” to do so.

Something has clearly gone wrong by the time we get to the third statement: if a jury has the legal power to decide in a certain way and legal immunity to having such decisions reversed, there’s no sense in law in which they don’t have the right to decide in that way. Judge Saini politely describes the Solicitor-General’s ‘power but no right’ formulation as ‘not ultimately helpful’. He goes on to say that what is at issue is

the tension between what is sometimes called “jury equity” (the power of the jury to give a verdict according to conscience), and the obligation of a jury to follow a judge’s directions on the law and abide by the juror’s oath/affirmation, which is to “faithfully try the defendant and deliver a true verdict according to the evidence”.

Equity was seen until relatively recently as existing alongside the courts (and indeed had courts of its own); this is where law gets squishy and malleable, with judges finding that a result for which the available laws give no support is nevertheless required in the interests of justice. For example, neither contract nor property law gives any direct support to an unmarried partner claiming part of the value of the couple’s home after a break-up, if there’s nothing on paper; equity may come to the rescue, subject to certain conditions (of which the most demanding, in practice, is probably being able to call on a lawyer). Jury equity is the same kind of thing: it justifies getting the right result in the wrong way.

Saini describes “jury equity” as “an established feature of our constitutional landscape” which “has been affirmed … in the highest courts”. He cites Lord Bingham’s categorical statement, in R v Ward [2005], that “[there are] no circumstances in which a judge is entitled to direct a jury to return a verdict of guilty”. And, if there are no such circumstances, it follows that a hypothetical situation in which there is no legal or factual dispute – the facts are uncontested, intention is admitted, the law is drafted such as to exclude any possible plea of ‘reasonable excuse’ – is also a situation in which the judge is not entitled to direct a guilty verdict. To say that juries can acquit on conscience is also to say that a judge cannot ‘go behind’ a jury’s decision to acquit and reject it if it does not appear to be made on valid grounds; by extension, juries can acquit for any reason whatsoever, good or bad. Saini quotes Lord Thomas in R v Goncalves [2011]: “a jury is entitled to acquit and its reasons for so doing are unknown. It is their right which cannot be questioned.”

At this point it may seem that Saini has proved too much: doesn’t this argument imply that the actions of an alternative Trudi Warner, who reminded jurors that they had the right to bring a verdict based on whether they like the defendant’s face, would also be covered by the umbrella of jury equity?

Saini rightly didn’t speculate on this hypothetical, but I think that conclusion isn’t necessary. Suppose that Judge Able is told by a spokesperson for the jury in her case that they intend to decide the case as a pure matter of conscience, as is their right. Later that day, Judge Baker bumps into a member of the jury in his case, who mentions that they haven’t really been paying attention but intend to acquit because the defendant “seems nice”. Two similar cases had concluded the previous day; by an extraordinary coincidence, Judge Clarence’s jury had also decided their case as a matter of conscience, while Judge Darrow’s jury had also based its decision on the defendant’s appearance. The difference between them and juries A and B is that juries C and D gave their verdict without having let the judge know what they’d been up to.

On these rather contrived facts, it seems to me that, firstly, there’s no significant difference between juries C and D, both of whom can go home and get on with their lives. “A jury is entitled to acquit and its reasons for so doing are unknown”; their verdicts stand and can’t now be overturned, and they will face no consequences for their unorthodox decision processes. As such, pace the Solicitor-General, they did in fact have a right to bring the verdicts on the basis that they did: they had the power to do it, they had an immunity to consequences for having done so, and a power and an immunity make a right.

But there’s an additional power/immunity pairing here. Back in the jury room, all four juries were directed by the judge to decide their case on the basis of the law and the evidence; all four of them had – and exercised – the power to decide the case on other grounds, tolerated as part of the justice system under the banner of “jury equity”. But, while there’s no difference between juries C and D, there is a significant difference between juries A and B, both of whom are (at the time of this thought-experiment) still in the process of deciding their case. Now that their – plainly defective and disrespectful – approach to the case has come to light, the members of jury B are liable to be discharged for abusing their position; jury A, on the other hand, hasn’t merited any more in the way of discipline than a restatement of the judge’s directions, probably followed by a resigned sigh.

Just as Jury A has, and C had, the power to decide the case on conscience, jury B has, and D had, the power to decide the case on frivolous grounds. The difference between juries A and B is that jury A has immunity to having that decision overruled, whereas jury B doesn’t – and neither would jury D have done, if what they did had become known. Usually, of course, how a jury decides a case never does become known, so the distinction between the right to decide the case (in whatever way) and the right to deliver a verdict (on whatever basis) is academic – but it is a real distinction.

Now, the information Trudi Warner was offering potential jurors was that they could decide the case based on conscience. Clearly there’s a general – albeit largely unpoliced – prohibition of deciding a case based on news coverage, rumour, hearsay, hunches, dice rolls etc, or for that matter on partial and slanted readings of the law: a jury who let it be known that that was how they were proceeding would at the very least be reprimanded by the judge, and actually encouraging a jury to do any of those things (or even reminding them of the possibility) would be a clear contempt. However, there’s a widespread and well-established understanding that conscience is different, and should be respected as a means for deciding a case. In current and established practice, any jury has both the power to decide a case on the basis of conscience and immunity to consequences for doing so; as such, they have the legal right to do so, even though it goes against the judge’s direct instructions.

What Trudi Warner did was remind them of this right, and that’s quite different from encouraging them to decide the case on other grounds. In the words of Judge Saini:

there is a tension which the law tolerates between the principle of jury equity and the duties in the oath and affirmation and obligation to follow judicial directions. … It is not unlawful to accurately communicate the bare principle of law to potential jurors in a public forum. (emphasis added)

It seems to me that that understanding – that toleration of jury equity – is what the Solicitor-General was attempting to challenge. I think it would have been a bad day for justice if the challenge had succeeded. We can be grateful to Mr Justice Saini for not allowing it to proceed.

The £10 Box: Path Into the Unknown, Antic Earth

My local Oxfam bookshop sets a high standard for the condition of the books it sells, with concomitantly high prices, at least for a charity shop; indeed, I think the underlying aim is to make people forget they’re in a charity bookshop. What happens to donations which aren’t in (let’s say) VG+ condition or better, I’m not sure, but they aren’t likely to go on the shelves.

One area where they make a partial exception to this stern policy is science fiction; there is a market for well-loved sf paperbacks and sun-bleached and age-spotted sf hardbacks, and the shop isn’t too proud to cater to it.

Which is how, several years ago, I came into possession of the £10 Box: an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979. It’s not a complete run by a long way – the SFBC issued 150 books in that period – but it’s an interesting scoop from a very productive period for sf.

Once I’d got the box home, all that remained was to read – or in several cases re-read – the books, and maybe put down a few notes about them as I went along. Not a difficult task, but getting around to it turned out to be more challenging than anticipated. It may give some idea of just how long this one has been on the ‘pending’ list if I tell you that my original plan was to post my book reviews on rec.arts.sf.written.

Still, we’re here now.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of twenty short posts, each reviewing two books reprinted by the Science Fiction Book Club between 1968 and 1979.

Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction SFBC 131
(no editor’s details are given in the book, but other editions are credited to Ms Merril)

A collection dated 1966, of eight short stories by seven authors, including one by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and another by Arkady alone (the Strugatskys are the only name familiar to me).

Science fiction writers working under Communism plainly couldn’t explore political or dystopian themes as freely as their Western counterparts; perhaps as a result, most of the stories here show a doggedly single-minded focus on elaborating a science-fictional conceit, either a philosophical issue or a hard-science trope, and in either case pitched a long way from any possible contemporary relevance.

Some of the more philosophical stories have the donnish, lumberingly playful quality of Stanislaw Lem’s earlier work (indeed, one story here is dedicated to Lem, “in memory of our argument which will never be resolved”); others take a trope such as the effects of relativistic time dilation and run with it, often ending by taking the story in fantastical directions that recall Western sf of an earlier period. I don’t know what editorial processes these stories had gone through, back in the USSR, but I suspect it was fairly light-touch; in a few cases there was a definite sense of an author making things up as he [sic] went along, science and all.

On the positive side, Ilya Varshavsky’s squib on the theme of “what if robots did exactly what we told them?” raised a smile (and I dare say it was a new joke back then); Arkady Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” is a neatly-turned vignette about humans, aliens and animals (not necessarily in that order); and Anatoly Dneprov’s “The Purple Mummy” features remote 3D printing, which is pretty good going for 1966.

Not great sf, but an intriguing memento of a long time ago in a union of socialist republics far, far away.

Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth SFBC 133

Originally published in 1967, this novel seems to have been resistent to naming: it was also published under the title Down to Earth, while the titles of foreign-language editions translate as “The Mysterious Force”, “Death of a Robot” and “Killer on the Asteroid”. Only one of the five gets anywhere near to the plot of the book – and it isn’t “Antic Earth”. (Antic Earth? Your guess is as good as mine.)

Anyway, it’s not very good. Charbonneau wrote Westerns as well as sf, and that’s basically what we have here: in an isolated outpost (a base on an asteroid), a brave man battles with fear and self-doubt to protect his wife and family from the perils of the frontier (space), culminating in a confrontation with a former rival (astronaut) now driven mad by jealousy.

The book does feature one unusual plot element, which could have been taken in some interesting directions. To stave off cosmic cabin fever, the family live surrounded by lifelike 3D projections of scenes on Earth, which makes the base more attractive to a homesick astronaut but ironically makes it easier for an intruder to go undiscovered. Charbonneau makes a lot of this, but he’s inevitably unable to say much about how it would actually work, while his take on the psychological effect of living in a fake reality doesn’t go much beyond “it gets boring after a while”.

[spoilers follow, in the unlikely event you want to avoid them]

Have it your way…

The opinion polls keep on giving Labour a 20-point lead over the Conservatives: as I write, six out of the last ten gave Labour leads of 21% or more. This is impressive in anyone’s language: before 2022, the last time Labour’s lead over the Tories went above 20% was in 2002 – and only about one in 20 polls in the intervening twenty years showed a lead of 10% or more.

That said, the pedant in me is reluctant to state as fact that Labour ‘have’ a 20-point lead. If you look at a running two-week average of polling figures, 20% leads have been decidedly elusive. Labour’s average lead has repeatedly hit 20%, only to slump back into the 19%s when the next day’s poll comes in; the current two-week average is 19.8%. But a 19.8% lead over the Tories is still pretty impressive – and anything over 19.5% is 20%, give or take a rounding error… so, have it your way*, you’ve got a 20% lead.

Now, just under a year ago I wrote a blog post looking at Labour’s (two-week-averaged) polling and noting that there was a distinct downward trend; the title of the post was “Sixteen points high and falling“. With Sunak taking over as PM, Labour’s polling lead had fallen from the dizzy heights of the Truss weeks to a more sustainable 20%-ish; unfortunately it had then fallen again, and looked like going on falling.

As indeed it did, for a time. When I wrote the post Labour were averaging 44.7% to the Tories’ 28.7%; in another two weeks the figures were Labour 43.5%, Conservatives 29.4% – a lead of only 14.1%. The drop was only temporary, though: pretty soon the Labour lead was back in the 16-18% region and stayed there for most of the rest of 2023, with occasional runs of 19s and 20s. We’re in just such a run at the moment, albeit a relatively long one: the lead hasn’t been below 19% for two days in a row since February. To all intents and purposes, Labour do indeed have a Twenty Point Lead.

But what kind of twenty-point lead? Bear with me, it’s a genuine question. Here’s a chart:

“NF” refers to the Brexit Party, a.k.a. Reform UK; Nigel Farage was sole proprietor of the former and has a majority shareholding in the latter. (Credit for this handy abbreviation goes to Chris Brooke.)

What do we see? The left-most column is the peak of Labour’s polling under Rishi Sunak (48.9% with a 21.5% lead over the Tories); the other three are occasions when Labour has again hit a 20-point lead (or something very close to it), over the last year and a bit.

Looking first at the middle two columns, what seems to have happened between March and October 2023 is a small redistribution of support away from the main parties – the Tories drop 1.4%, NF gain 1.4%; Labour lose 1.5%, the Greens and Lib Dems put on 2.2% (the difference being made up by a drop in ‘other’ parties’ votes).

Parenthetically, may I just apologise at this point to any readers in Wales, Scotland and the North of Ireland. Yes, I’m (a) lumping in Plaid, the SNP, Sinn Fein et al with the ‘others’ and (b) representing them as a blank space; it’s not ideal. In my defence, representing those parties by their UK-wide share – which would have them scrapping with the Greens for last place – wouldn’t really give an accurate picture either. Welsh, Scottish and NI votes – and voting intention polls – really need analysing separately, ideally by someone who knows what they’re talking about.

So you’ve got a bit of polarisation – centre-Left to Left, Right to far Right – and a bit of whatever it is when people move from Labour to Lib Dem these days (at one time I would have called it polarisation on the authoritarian/liberal axis, but I’m not sure that still applies).

But now look at what had happened between columns 1 and 2, which is to say between November ’22 and March ’23. There’s no (apparent) change in Tory or Lib Dem support; the Greens are up 0.5%; but Labour are down 2.6%. The missing piece is that NF are up 2.2%.

How to explain what went on there? It’s possible that 2% of voters switched from Labour to Reform; maybe Labour’s relentless focus on Tory voters in 2021-22 had swept up some people who, on mature reflection, preferred Richard Tice’s party as their anti-Tory protest vote. But it seems more likely that there were two separate flows here: that the Tories put on 2% from supporters who had been sufficiently alienated by Truss to loan their support to Labour, and were now returning to the fold, while also losing 2% to NF (perhaps voters alienated by Sunak).

Now compare columns 3 and 4, the end of October ’23 and mid-April ’24. Halloween 2023: 19.8% Labour lead; Easter holidays 2024: 19.8% Labour lead. In the mean time, though, Labour’s polling has dropped by 2.4%. Redistribution on the Left is minimal: the Greens have only put on 0.4%, and the Lib Dem voting intention has actually gone down by 1%. Both major parties are down by 2.4%, the Lib Dems are down by 1%… and NF are up by 6%. Which, incidentally, puts them in a very comfortable third (party) place, three points clear of the Lib Dems. Labour and the Lib Dems between them have lost 0.4% to the Greens and 3%, presumably, to the Tories – and they in turn have, presumably, lost 5.4% (out of a notional 28.9%) to NF. This is rightward drift with a vengeance.

In short, what appears to be the headline story is that, between November 2022 and April 2024 Labour’s polling lead over the Tories went down by 1.7%, from ‘comfortably over 20%’ to ‘just under 20%’. Big deal. But the lead is a derivative measure; the data it’s derived from is the actual expressions of voting intention, and something quite big has happened there. Labour’s polling has dropped by 5.6%, from a very secure 48.9% to a rather less impregnable 43.3%. (You’ll recall that, when Labour’s lead fell briefly to a post-Truss low of 14.1%, the party was polling 43.5%.) Meanwhile the Tories have dropped 3.9%, almost keeping step with Labour and so keeping Labour’s lead reassuringly high. The Lib Dems and Greens together have put on a total of 2.1% and, to complete the picture, the ‘Others’ total has dropped by 2.2%. 5.6 + 3.9 + 2.2 (losses) – 2.1 (gain) = 9.6%. That’s what remains unaccounted for, and that’s how much the NF voting intention has increased – which is to say, it’s quadrupled: from 3.2% to 12.8%.

Now, a twenty-point lead over the Tory Party is a good thing for Labour to have; I can’t say I don’t like the thought of the Tories facing a defeat on the scale of 1997, or even 1993. But it seems to me that there’s a story here that’s getting lost – or rather, two possible stories, neither of them very reassuring. In discussions on Bluesky, when I raise the prospect of Reform getting a 10-12% share of the vote, I’ve been assured that it’s not likely to happen: Reform’s a pure protest option, not a party people actually vote for – look at the party’s dismal showing in recent by-elections. When I raise the prospect of a 10-12% boost to the Tory vote from returning Reform voters, on the other hand, I’ve been assured that that’s not likely to happen: polling shows that those people are no more likely to vote Tory than any other non-Tory voter, which is to say, not very. The trouble is, arithmetically one of those two has pretty much got to happen. I suppose the ideal would be a third scenario in which the rightward drift reverses – in which Reform voters go back to the Tories and Tories go back to Labour, or else Reform voters leapfrog the Tories and go straight to Labour – but the conditions to make that happen have only obtained once in recent years, and they don’t currently look like recurrring. (More on this in a follow-up post.)

So, there are two main possibilities. The first is that, on election night, NF perform at or near the level where they’re currently polling. In that case, I’m afraid the fourteen-year self-destruction of the Liberal Democrats will finally be complete, as Britain will have a new third party: a party with Nigel Farage as its most prominent member; a party whose headline policies are cutting taxes, abandoning Net Zero and stopping immigration. I shudder to think of the effect on Britain’s political discourse, over the course of a Labour government, of the news media giving the microphone to that party on a regular basis – and that’s without considering the boost that anti-political populism will get if they outpoll the Lib Dems but still get no seats.

The other possibility takes us back to the question I started with – what kind of twenty-point lead have Labour got? It seems to me that some large polling leads over a right-wing party are more fragile than others – and a lead which is dependent on the right-wing party’s vote being preyed on by a far-Right party is more fragile than most. Think back – if you can bear it – to 2019. Here are the two-week polling averages from the 31st of October – the day before the election was called – and how it stood when votes were counted on Friday the 13th of December:

	Con	Lab	LD	NF	Green	Others
31/10/2019	36.8%	25.0%	17.6%	11.2%	3.7%	5.7%
13/12/2019	43.6%	32.1%	11.6%	2.0%	2.8%	7.9%
+/-	6.8%	7.1%	-6.0%	-9.2%	-0.9%	2.2%

Now, the 2% that NF got on election night is about the level they were polling all through the 2020-22 Johnson and what’s-her-name premierships. It’s not quite Monster Raving Loony Party levels – it’s a definite residual following; but it is residual. The fact that the other 9.2% melted away over the course of the short campaign is suggestive, to say the least. Was that always going to happen? Alternatively, if a deal was done, can we picture Sunak – or a last-minute, last-throw-of-the-dice, alternative Tory leader – pulling off a similar trick this time round?

If so, we get to the second possible story – one that’s considerably less alarming than the prospect of NF as Britain’s Third Party, but which still has very little about it to cheer Labour. Suppose that, when it comes to the crunch, April 2024’s 12.8% is just as willing to be called home to the mothership as October 2019’s 11.2%; suppose that, thanks to some particularly fancy footwork, the fix is in from the moment the next election is called. (Rishi Sunak hasn’t exactly been noted for his fancy footwork, admittedly – but see above, ‘last-minute, last-throw-of-the dice’ etc.) Where would that leave us? It seems to me that we’d be looking at polling figures in the region of Labour 43%, Conservative 35%. This would represent a solid lead in most times, but it wouldn’t be a reassuring position to be in at the start of an election campaign – a period in which, as we know from plentiful experience, the Tories and their friends in the media tend to throw everything they’ve got at Labour, and Labour’s support tends to fall (scroll down, ‘one final chart’). (More on this in the follow-up post.)

It’s also worth stressing the fundamental point: even if, thanks to our stupid electoral system, the two drifts – from Labour to Tory and from Tory to NF – effectively cancel each other out, they still represent an overall drift to the Right. NF may be cannibalising the Tory vote, but the overall Right vote isn’t static; add the two parties’ voting intention together and you get 30.6% in November 2022 (vs Labour on 48.9%), 36.3% in April 2024 (with Labour on 43.3%). Over the last couple of years we’ve seen the short-term rewards Labour can gain by assuming the people of Britain are on the Right and pitching their appeal accordingly; we may now be seeing how that policy unwinds in the longer term. (Why vote for a former socialist who’s trying desperately hard to impress you, when you can just vote for an actual right-winger?)

As the saying goes, “Be yourself – everyone else is taken”. The only ideological territory Labour can ever really own is on the Left, or at least Left of centre; sooner or later, pure electoral self-interest is going to push the party back that way. Sooner or later, Labour are going to have to stop suppressing the Left and appealing to the Right, and start mobilising the Left and fighting the Right. But I’m afraid that penny isn’t likely to drop until after the next election.

Next: some more thoughts about polling highs and what tends to become of them. Or else I’ll review some sf.

*Hat-tip to James Thurber:

An album a day: February

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in February.

The Associates The Affectionate Punch
Apparently Alan Rankine came up with the piano figure for Party Fears Two while punk was still in the ascendant, and had to keep it stashed away until fashions had changed enough to make it acceptable. In the mean time, they channelled his extraordinary musical imagination – and Billy Mackenzie’s even more extraordinary voice – through the urgency and skronky edginess of post-punk. With, well, extraordinary results – this is a truly great album, even if it isn’t what they actually wanted to do.

David Bowie Young Americans, Station to Station
Bowie completism has its rewards: you may have spotted the deep soul influence on Young Americans, but how about the Latin rhythms, or the attempt to ‘do’ Springsteen? (And that’s just the title track.) A much better – and much odder – album than it appears at first. Bowie completism won’t help you get under the surface of Station to Station, though; I’m not sure what would, short of going on a diet of cocaine, sleep deprivation and Aleister Crowley. (But what a surface.)

Cornelius Point
This album is really nothing like Pet Sounds, or Chill Out, or The Faust Tapes. Even apart from being Japanese. It’s just that you feel you’ve wandered into someone’s multi-tracked musical dream, and that it’s rather a nice place to spend 45 minutes.

Eno Another green world
Hmm. A bit of a rag bag – less than the sum of its parts. (I’ll Come Running is wonderful, though.)

The Magnetic Fields Distant plastic trees, The wayward bus, The charm of the highway strip, Get lost, Distortion, Love at the bottom of the sea
Do you have a favourite band? More – much more – from Stephin Merritt. These are, respectively, the first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth albums by the Magnetic Fields, recorded between 1992 and 2012. Three of them can reasonably be called masterpieces, which is a pretty good hit rate (particularly when you consider that album #6 was 69 Love Songs, which absolutely is one). Different stylistic choices come to the fore on different albums – Phil Spector on TWB, Country and Western on TCOTHS, repeating loops on Get Lost, the Jesus and Mary Chain on Distortion; some feature few synthesisers or none (Get Lost, Distortion), some feature little or nothing else (TWB, LATBOTS – although, as Merritt noted, the synthesisers he used on the latter album hadn’t been invented at the time of TWB). The songwriting throughout is extraordinary: a dry, heartless wit, masking – and failing to mask – sorrow and yearning as deep as a well.

Scott Walker ‘Til the band comes in
If I was feeling cranky I’d say this was Scott Walker’s best collection of songs before Tilt; it’s certainly head and shoulders above Scott Four. It’s just a shame he only had 26 minutes’ worth of songs and had to pad the album out with covers.

Wire Object 47
The album that Read and Burn 03 is better than. It’s fine – there’s a lot to like about it – but it’s not a total return to form (see Red Barked Tree).

FILE UNDER: JAZZ

The Necks Vertigo; Soft Machine Hidden Details
Vertigo (a single 44-minute track) is one of the Necks’ edgier, more unsettling pieces; I should probably invest in a few more for comparison. What they do – extended trio improvisations, basically – is a very distinctive way of making music. As for the Softs, that band and I have history. I got this CD when I saw the Hidden Details band – John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Roy Babbington and John Marshall – playing live in 2019; only the second time I’d seen the band, the first time being with the lineup of Allan Holdsworth, Mike Ratledge, Karl Jenkins, Roy Babbington and John Marshall. They’ve drifted a bit further into jazz than I’m entirely keen on, and I’m not sure I’ll be following them any further – particularly now that the lineup consists of John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Baker and Asaf Sirkis (John Marshall RIP). (The Venn circle for “long-term Soft Machine fans” is included within that of “lovers of Rock Family Trees”.) It’s a decent album, though, with a lovely version of The Man Who Waved At Trains.

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Bob Lewis The painful plough; Various Dark Holler; Brian Peters Songs of trial and triumph
Bob Lewis is an English traditional singer from whom I’ve learnt a great deal – I’ve learnt the extraordinary tunes to some of his traditional songs, and I’ve learnt to emulate his high, clear tenor, or at least to have the nerve to give it a go. (Indeed, it would be difficult to sing some of his tunes without emulating his singing voice.) Dark Holler is a Folkways compilation of unaccompanied singers from North Carolina, recorded in the 1960s: some strong and distinctive voices deliver what to a British folkie is some surprisingly familiar material, albeit in unusual forms: Dillard Chandler’s song Little Farmer Boy, for instance, appears on Brian Peters’ album of Child ballads, under the more familiar title of The Demon Lover. Brian sings The Demon Lover unaccompanied, but accompanies other songs on Anglo concertina, melodeon and guitar – electric guitar in the case of Twa Corbies. It’s a great selection, well delivered; I’ve already borrowed Brian’s versions of All Alone and Lonely (a.k.a. The Cruel Mother), Fause Foodrage and Six Nights Drunk (a.k.a. Our Goodman), although I’m not sure that Brian’s version of the last-mentioned is entirely traditional (“Who owns that crash helmet where my bobble-hat ought to be?”).

FILE UNDERIN THE REGION OF: FOLK

Alistair Anderson Corby Crag, Steel Skies; Jim Causley Cyprus Well II; Ed Kuepper Today Wonder
Two instrumental albums from the multi-instrumentalist (English concertina and Northumbrian pipes) Alistair Anderson, exemplifying the odd fact that ‘tunes’ – instrumental traditional music – can absorb new material in a way that ‘songs’ can’t. Perhaps it’s just that few people are as steeped in traditional song as someone like Anderson is in traditional music. Steel Skies is all original compositions, and it’s terrific. Jim Causley is a folk singer, but this CD – produced at home, in lockdown – is his second collection of settings of poems by his distant relative Charles Causley. It’s good stuff: sensitive arrangements of some memorable and moving poems. Lastly, my favourite Ed Kuepper album; also the (studio) album recorded the quickest and cheapest, and the one containing the most folk or folk-adjacent material (Pretty Mary (a.k.a. The Wagoner’s Lad); a terrific version of Tim Hardin’s If I were a carpenter; and the title track, a medley of the Animals’ White Houses and Donovan’s Hey Gyp – a song which in turn goes back to Taj Mahal’s Chevrolet and ultimately to a 1930 song, Can I do it for you by Memphis Minnie).

(I do like those Rock Family Trees…)

And that’s it for February. Round up of what happened in March coming soonwhen I get round to it.

Should I stay or…

Owen Jones recently made a bit of a splash by announcing that, despite having voted for Labour at every election in the last 21 years and despite having family connections to the party going back two generations, he’s cancelled his membership.

We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.

It’s interesting that what seems to have been the last straw for Owen isn’t Labour’s current stance on Gaza or its current policy positions, woeful though both of those are:

ending the two-child benefit cap would lift 250,000 children out of poverty, and lessen the effects of poverty on a further 850,000, but Starmer backed keeping it anyway. … This is the same Labour party that has ruled out bringing back a cap on bankers’ bonuses or instituting a wealth tax. The same Labour party committed to Tory fiscal rules that lock the country into dismal austerity policies that have delivered collapsing public services and an unprecedented decline in living standards. The same Labour party that gutted its one distinctive flagship policy, a £28bn-a-year green investment fund, not because it came under pressure, but because it feared it might.

Rather, what tipped the balance seems to have been the unprincipled cynicism and mendacity of the current leadership, and (to judge from the rest of the article) their authoritarian and openly factional approach to the party they ostensibly lead. Both these unpleasant attributes suggest that the current leadership sees British politics in essentially presidential terms, and fairly debased presidential terms at that: what counts is getting Keir Starmer into Number 10 and, er, that’s it. If achieving that goal means abandoning Labour policies, treating Labour MPs like members of staff and alienating Labour members – and then swearing blind that none of this is happening – well, so be it; do you want to win the next election or don’t you? Owen takes the view that this isn’t a form of politics he wants to endorse to the point of remaining a member of the party, and it’s hard to disagree.

I’ve been thinking of writing about (possibly) leaving the party for a while, as it goes. I wouldn’t say Owen’s stolen my thunder, but he has forced my arm; if not now, when? And I agree that Gaza has shown Keir Starmer in a very bad light, both in the positions he’s taken and in how he’s taken them. I found the clip I commented on here particularly depressing:

"Stop this campaign before it kills tens of thousands of people" – sentimental protest tactics, not worthy of a serious politician
"Stop this campaign which has killed tens of thousands of people" – principled, statesmanlike politics https://t.co/OpxhnLeF5D

— Phil Edwards 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 (@DrSchwitters) March 21, 2024

I can see where Starmer’s coming from, if I squint. It’s certainly true that a broadly pro-Israel position will go down easier with the US and the EU – and, in Britain, with the particular bodies that Labour has chosen to identify as representative of “the Jewish community” – than an anti-Israel one. If you carry that reasoning far enough, I guess you can reach a point where it just isn’t realistic for a Labour leader to take a stand against genocide; not unless it’s actually in progress, at any rate. It’s not a train of thought I’d ever want to follow; the words ‘awful warning’ spring to mind. (Obviously I couldn’t call for a ceasefire back in October – be serious! Back then Israel had hardly had the chance to kill anyone!) But what I find most depressing isn’t how morally repugnant Starmer’s position is but how self-evident he appears to find it: it suggests someone far more attuned to how a policy sounds (to a particular audience) that what the policy actually is.

So no, the thought of continuing as a member of this party, united around the objective of making this guy Prime Minister, doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. What are the arguments in favour? When I began thinking about this post I identified one possible reason as ‘being a part of something’, but rapidly realised that all the reasons I could think of were variations on that theme; the only difference is in the ‘something’ that we’re talking about being a part of. Let’s start big and work down.

If I stay in the party I can be part of…

…the party that’s going to form the next government!

I’m not indifferent to this argument. I argued a few years back that the supposed paradox of voting (if no one vote can ever be decisive, no one person’s vote matters – and if no one person’s vote matters, nobody’s vote matters) disappears if you take a retrospective view of elections:

the day after the election something will have been decided; we vote to bet on a particular outcome while making it fractionally more likely, because we want to have contributed to bringing that outcome about … every time we go to vote we’re saying that there is a result we want to bring about, and we want to be among the people who can look back and say they made it happen.

Similarly, and more so, for party membership. But… how much do I really want to be part of the effort to elect that guy and his party? (See above.) I wasn’t rejoicing on 1st May 1997, and I already dread almost all the possible outcomes next time round – a Labour landslide very much included. Apart from anything else, how much (more) damage is the current leadership going to do to the party’s democratic structures before they’re finished?

There is, of course, an argument that nothing we’re hearing from Labour in opposition is a reliable guide to what they’ll do in government (after they’ve been elected on the basis of what they’re saying now) – any more than Keir Starmer’s ten pledges were a reliable guide to how he would act as leader, after he was elected on that basis. There’s also an argument that a woman who’s been beaten up by her unfaithful fiancé should still go through with the wedding, because (a) how he acts when they’re engaged says nothing about how he’ll act when they’re married, and what’s more (b) he’s already shown he’s capable of changing (by becoming unfaithful and violent).

So it’s a No to that one. What else would party membership let me remain a part of?

…the process of forming the policies of the next government!

This would be a great thing to be part of. Unfortunately, membership of the Labour Party gives me about as much access to the party’s policy-making process as it does to the Garrick Club. Under the reorganisation implemented in the early days of New Labour (and never reversed), policy development is the responsibility of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a body with a membership of 200; 55 places are reserved for elected representatives of the party membership, five each from the nine English regions plus Wales and Scotland. You’d have a better chance of getting on Mastermind – and probably more opportunities to make left-wing arguments if you did. My region – Northwest England – currently has only two NPF reps, for whatever reason; both are long-serving Labour councillors. (There are also nine places reserved for Labour local government representatives.)

The NPF does periodically invite submissions from party members, of course – and there is, of course, still an annual Conference, where policy resolutions are debated. But in both of these cases the chances of getting a hearing for anything remotely left-field (in either sense of the word) is minuscule – and, crucially, in neither case does the leadership consider itself bound by anything emanating from below. (This change in leadership culture is also a New Labour legacy, and one that simultaneously complements the organisational change and makes it meaningless. New Labour was like that.)

Really, the lack of effective democracy within the Labour Party is hard to overstate. Even in a democratic centralist party – whose policies, once agreed, are binding on party representatives on all levels – there are some mechanisms for proposals to be fed upwards from the membership to the leadership. They’re liable to be heavily filtered on the way, and the process of cadre formation will ensure that very few of them are at all heterodox to begin with, but there’s still the chance for the leadership to be caught on the back foot (as the Socialist Workers’ Party discovered to its cost). Not so in the Labour Party; not since Blair. The process of forming the party programme – and hence the policies of the next government – is owned by the leadership and whoever they may choose to listen to, which is a group that doesn’t include party members.

OK then, but how about being part of

…a movement within the party to change all this?

Have I considered, in other words, that I could not only stay but stay and fight? Well. To answer that question, allow me to quote a member of the radical autonomist A/traverso collective, commenting on the anti-repression conference held in Bologna in 1977 and its aftermath:

At the end everyone felt a slight sense of bitterness, disappointment, frustration as they went back to their own areas and the places where they lived and fought. Everyone was determined to carry on, to move forward, but nobody could ignore the crucial question: forward how? forward where?

Stay and fight how? Stay and fight where? I can stay and cast votes in internal party elections – I could vote for a Left National Policy Forum representative, or for Left candidates in the membership section of the National Executive Committee – but the effect would be extremely limited. Until recently there were six membership representatives on the NEC, with the numbers taken by the Left rising from 3 in 2012 to 6 in 2016; the Corbyn-era expansion of the section from six representatives to nine gave the Left nine NEC representatives in 2018, a bloc that would be worth voting for. However, this was effectively neutered in 2020 by the introduction of a preferential voting system, meaning that Left representation in the section went from 6 out of 6 in 2016 to 9/9 in 2018… and 5/9 in 2020.

The Left could stay and fight to take over individual parties, I suppose; I think a lot of ‘stay and fight’ discourse envisages this as the first step, as if the Left comes into being not as scattered individuals but as cohesive groups, each one large enough to swamp the local Right. Back in the real world, we have of course tried this – and had very limited success, even at the high-water mark of Corbynism. (Corbynism was great in lots of ways, but another time we are going to have to do better.)

Or might I want – thinking back to the ‘retrospective’ justification for party membership – to be part of

…the group who – at some point in the future, when the Left is stronger and the party’s internal democracy has been renewed – can say that they were here all along?

Well, no, not really. When leaving the party is being discussed, friends who have been in the party for longer than me often counsel patience, remind us that things have been a lot worse in the past and say that the party is going to be the best place to be when the current leadership falters and the Left revives again. The trouble is, I can’t see why that isn’t just an argument for joining the party when the Left revives again. Maybe I’d have difficulty rejoining then after leaving now; maybe new members generally would be barred from important votes for six months, as happened in 2016. But if the Left’s strong enough, they’ll be able to remove the obstacles its enemies have put in its path – and if (as with Corbyn) the Left ultimately isn’t that strong (or focused, or determined), well, better to know sooner than later.

In the mean time, though, don’t I want to be part of

…a community of like-minded people in the local area?

Dude, I live in Chorlton – this is a community of like-minded people. I don’t need to go to a local Labour Party meeting to find other people who read the Guardian and buy Fairtrade coffee, although I’ll certainly find some there.

I won’t find many socialists in a local Labour Party meeting, though, unless they’re people I know and we’ve gone along specially. The local Labour establishment held the line against the Left throughout the Corbyn period – even in 2017, when it was touch and go for a moment – and they’re holding it still. And holding the line, let’s be clear, means excluding the Left from any effective influence over the branch – even if that means having current office holders play musical chairs with the available positions. At the ward’s most recent AGM thirteen people were elected (to nineteen positions); ten of the thirteen had previously been elected on at least two occasions, eight of them four times or more.

I could understand it if the Left were a gang of Trots demanding the immediate nationalisation of leading local industries (Unicorn, Chorlton Cheesemongers and the Makers’ Market), and threatening to stop the party getting on with the serious business of building environmentally-conscious social democracy locally – and I think that is how the cliqueestablishment sees us. (At best – to judge from their contributions at party meetings, some of them just think we’re Nazis.) But if anything the opposite is closer to the truth. There was a contested election for Women’s Officer at an AGM a few years back; the Left candidate proposed campaigns on forced marriage, domestic violence and period poverty, to which the establishment candidate replied by proposing a picnic to celebrate International Women’s Day. The latter won comfortably; at the following AGM she was elected Chair of the branch.

All of that said, there is a local Left – an actual community of like-minded people, almost all of whom I met through the party in the Corbyn years; I’m still in touch with a lot of them through social media. But that’s not a reason to stay in the party, as an awful lot of them have either been expelled or left of their own accord – and even those who are hanging on in the party often focus their campaigning outside it.

That only leaves one reason to stay in the party – and it’s not actually a bad one (although it does sound quite negative when you first hear it). Do I want to be part of

…the group who persistently try to get left-wing motions through the local party hierarchy, even if the only real effect is to annoy the local cliqueelected leadership?

I’ve had a bash at this; I proposed that the party endorse the principle of allowing local parties to select their candidates instead of having candidates imposed or vetoed by the leadership, as advocated in 2020 by, er, Keir Starmer actually. The motion was carried at the branch, but ran into trouble at the CLP; arguments against included “this isn’t happening to any significant extent”; “it is happening, but everyone who’s been affected deserves it”; the baffling (and/or anti-democratic) argument that “party members aren’t elected by anyone, so they shouldn’t be selecting candidates”; and the all-purpose “we shouldn’t even be discussing this, it’s a distraction from winning the next election”. The last of these was particularly popular. (I would have thought a motion about selecting the best candidates for the next election had some relevance to winning the next election, but I’m not a Professor of Politics.)

Losing to some really terrible arguments was undeniably bruising, but up to that point it was quite fun – especially when I provoked one delegate from our ward into saying that letting local parties choose their candidates was just wrong, and if Keir Starmer had argued for it then Keir Starmer was wrong. (Implying that the Corbyn leadership was right when it imposed its chosen candidates. Hey ho.) Looking back I do regret making my submission in calm, conciliatory tones, having gauged the tone of the meeting (up to then) and scrapped my original plan of going in quite hard (“I don’t want to hear any nonsense about not caring whether Labour win”, etc). Being friendly didn’t obviously gain me any advantage, and it certainly didn’t gain me any votes.

That motion was never actually going to win, though, not in that room. The reaction of half – well, more than half – of the delegates to anything emanating from the Left was essentially

It wasn’t a complete waste of time, though, even if you discount the transient pleasure of winding up people you don’t like. (It’s not personal; they’ve given me plenty of reasons not to like them.) Something I noticed on the night, but didn’t really think about until later, was that the delegates who voted against the motion I was speaking for – which I was proposing, at the CLP, on behalf of the ward party – included several delegates from my ward, who were thus voting against their own branch’s motion. If they’d all voted in favour, in fact, the vote would have been tied. Some friends raised this at the next branch meeting, and I’m happy to say caused some embarrassment. I was half expecting the clique to claim freedom of conscience, point out that the Labour Party isn’t a democratic centralist party and generally brazen it out, but I suppose this line would have been difficult to sustain in front of the branch – which had, as we remember, passed that motion in the first place. The principle that a branch’s delegates should probably vote for that branch’s motions was fairly readily accepted, although there was some foot-shuffling over the evident fact that this hadn’t happened; one member of the clique even suggested that some branch delegates might also have been there as a delegate of an affiliated society (although in this case they would presumably have voted in favour of the motion as well as against, which I’m pretty sure nobody did).

So say not the struggle naught availeth, eh. It’s just that the struggle is a struggle, and at the end of the day it availeth not terribly much.

There is one, final, reason not to leave, which is that nobody will notice if I do, or indeed care – a thought that makes the idea of staying on to make trouble for the clique particularly persuasive. Equally, if I do leave, it would be nice to make a bit of noise on my way out (as Owen Jones indubitably has). But I’m not at all sure that these are good enough reasons to remain a member of a party with the Butcher’s Apron on its membership card, a leadership that’s running interference for a state committing genocide and few identifiable policies that I actually support.

An album a day: January

Around the beginning of the year, it struck me that there had been quite a few days when I hadn’t listened to any music at all – and that, when I did play anything, it was liable to be a dip into one of several gargantuan playlists (not that I’m an obsessive or anything, but my iTunesApple Music apparently library includes approximately 22 hours of music by Radiohead, 29 by Robyn Hitchcock in various guises and a slightly alarming 67 hours (can that possibly be right?) by David Bowie). (OK, five hours of that is Tin Machine, but that still leaves 62 – and it occurs to me now that “I’m No Bowie Obsessive, Says Man Who Owns Five Hours of Tin Machine” lacks a certain something.)

So I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project. (This criterion is already starting to trip me up, and it’s only the middle of February.)

Here’s what I listened to in January. (Not a full month – it was a slow start.)

Peter Blegvad Go Figure; John Greaves, Peter Blegvad, Lisa Herman Kew. Rhone.
Peter Blegvad (13 hours) is a writer, an illustrator, a singer-songwriter; if he has a theme it’s the power of imagination and the limits of language, and/or vice versa. Some of his work is light, witty and whimsical, some forbiddingly surreal and weird, most somewhere in between. Go Figure, his most recent solo album, is a nice, well-executed collection of songs; essential for Blegvad aficionados but probably not the best starting point. Way over at the other extreme, 1977’s Kew. Rhone. [sic] is an album of big-band jazz with lyrics by Blegvad, mostly belted out by a small choir in vaguely Brechtian style. There’s a piece (‘song’ would be pushing it) consisting of words spelt with the letters in the (never explained) phrase ‘Kew. Rhone’; another consists of specially-composed palindromes; “22 Objects and Their Descriptions” offers brief, riddling word-pictures of objects which are then described conventionally, turning out to be weird, surreal assemblages. It’s all very pataphysical.

Shirley Collins Archangel Hill
I’m not going to introduce Shirley Collins (9 hours, not counting some as-yet unripped vynil). This is the third and probably last of her late-life, post-return albums; it includes one track which appeared on the now out-of-print collection Within Sound and re-recordings of three others, along with six traditional songs and three new pieces. If you’re into folk at all you should have this.

Bob Dylan Good as I been to you
An album of traditional songs and (slightly to my surprise) a really good one; although I’ve got the CD, I listened to this one on YouTube on our TV (progress eh?), and by the end of the album found myself just looking at the (static) screen, thinking, how are you doing that? This doesn’t refer to Bob’s guitar work (detailed and fiddly though it is) but his interpretation of the songs, some of which are quite familiar. Recommended.

Future Bible Heroes Memories of love; The Magnetic Fields Quickies; Stephin Merritt Obscurities
Stephin Merritt: 16 hours. Respectively, these are the first of Merritt’s albums of lyrics to Chris Ewen’s synth-pop backings; the most recent album from Merritt’s main band, with 28 songs in 47 minutes backed by a deliberately limited set of instruments; an album of B-sides and out-takes. None of them’s a masterpiece, but they’re all well worth your time. (Almost anywhere is a good place to start with Stephin Merritt.)

Robyn Hitchcock The man downstairs; Shufflemania!; Robyn Hitchcock and Andy Partridge Planet England (EP)
Respectively, an album of demos, live tracks and out-takes; Robyn’s lockdown album, a set of home-studio collaborations with musicians around the world; an endearing and very English set of four songs from 2019. Planet England is a small gem (and would put Robyn at two degrees of separation from Peter Blegvad, if the two of them hadn’t in fact played together). As for the albums, there is some great stuff there, but I’m not the one to judge – I’ve been buying Robyn’s records since 1977, so I’m hardly going to stop now. If you are looking for an entry-point, I’d probably start with 2017’s Robyn Hitchcock (crazy name!).

Kraftwerk Autobahn
Nothing like a 20-minute track to justify a full-album listening session. Although I must admit that, as much as I love the title track, I’ve grown to love “Morgenspaziergang” even more. The road (or footpath) not taken…

Livingstones Kabinet Dead of the Night
Tidying out some old files in preparation for getting a new Mac, I found an old “want list” – very old; 2004 to be precise. Halfway down was a reference to Livingstones Kabinet, with a note underneath saying that the CD was only available by “mail order”. Not long after saving that file I stopped listening to anything except traditional folk songs for a couple of years, and the gap that created in my listening habits meant that I never followed up on most of the list. It turns out not only that Livingstones Kabinet are still out there – albeit they’re now a Danish theatre group rather than a cabaret duo – but that a couple of their albums are available to download on Apple Music, this being one of them. It’s not the album I was after in 2004, but it is rather good, if you like your cabaret music dark and surreal.

Love Forever Changes
I’m not introducing this band either, let alone this album (other than to say that I hadn’t previously realised just how many of the songs are about reincarnation). I mean, what is there to say? “The red telephone” alone is a major cultural landmark.

Wire Read and Burn 03 (EP); Red Barked Tree
Wire: 14 hours. These are, respectively, the last recordings by Wire’s fourth and the first by the (current) sixth incarnation. The EP’s very strong – it slightly overshadows the Object 47 album that followed. I’m particularly fond of “23 Years Too Late”, a song about touring Denmark 23 years after the band had originally planned to go and being greeted by what looked like the same audience, 23 years older. Red Barked Tree marks a definite break from the heads-down-no-nonsense style of Object 47 and Send, branching out [sic] in several different directions; there’s even a song in 6:8. I’m still a few years behind on Wire, but I look forward to catching up with what they were doing in the 2010s.

And that’s it for January. I’m not going to plough straight on with February, you’ll be glad to hear; I’ve got the Box of Forty Science Fiction Hardbacks to write about. Or I might do something on current affairs, or have a moan about the Labour Party…

Remembering Judy Garland: Michael Stripe

I’ll never forget Judy Garland – or Judy Galand, as she was briefly known. I don’t know where the idea of dropping the R came from, it was just one of those sudden inspirations. Judy wasn’t keen, and we went back to ‘Garland’ before long. I think it increased her appeal in some quarters, mind you.

After my experience with Judy I forgot my theory of the ‘superfluous R’ for several years. I think what reminded me of it was the way that young Eric Crapton’s fortunes picked up when he changed his name. That wasn’t one of my ideas – I never actually worked with Eric. As I said to him when he approached me once, a high-powered fusion of psychedelia, free jazz and swamp blues is all very well in theory, but it’s never going to play in Hoylake. It was kindly meant; I hope he took it to heart.

Anyway, young Eric’s unorthodox approach to his superfluous R got me thinking, and I began to apply my method once again. I think the results speak for themselves. Just look at dear old Diana Drors. (That wasn’t her original name, of course – she’d begun life as a Fruck.) Losing the R worked well for String, too, and it did wonders for Reg (nice chap, Reg; plays guitar with the U2).

Then, of course, there’s Michael Stripe. Michael’s home town of Athens is a hotbed of musical activity, as we know, particularly in the area of tribute acts. Michael actually got his start thanks to his mother Shirley. She had the bright idea of putting together a Partridge Family tribute, revolving around Michael and his irritating little red-haired brother Jackie; both the boys would play guitar and sing, while she played keyboards and beamed. And of course the Stripe Family, unlike the Partridges, were in fact a family, give or take some distant cousins on drums, tambourine and bouzouki.

Everything was going well until Georgia and Basil Strype appeared on the scene. Rudi and Trudi Strype, to give them their real names, had a nightclub soul act; Trudi’s repertoire included songs made famous by Mary Wells, Kim Weston and Tammi Terrell, while Rudi specialised very much in Marvin Gaye. For Michael, the problems began when Trudi and Rudi adopted a new musical direction: going out as Georgia and Basil, they rapidly became the region’s foremost Peaches and Herb tribute act.

Georgia and Basil’s success spelt trouble for Shirley, Michael and irritating little Jackie. The Stripe Family were frequently confused with the duo, who were still using ‘Strype’ as their surname. Usually Shirley managed to sort out the misunderstanding before things went too far, but inevitably mistakes were made. Let’s face it, if you’re expecting to hear “Reunited” with your mezes (not to mention Peaches and Herb’s other hits) you won’t want to listen to “I think I love you” – or, indeed, the Partridge Family’s other hits. There were some ugly scenes. It was hard on little Jackie; it was even harder on Michael, who was expected to rally round and support his little brother, red-haired and irritating though he was.

Things came to a head when Rudi Strype waded in. Bit of a hothead, was Rudi – didn’t like to be beaten, couldn’t take failure. Anyway, he decided that the Stripe Family were deliberately sabotaging his business; apparently he took Michael on one side and told him that the next plate to be smashed in that town would be broken over his head. It all got too much for Michael, and he resolved to jump ship and join an Electric Light Orchestra tribute act, Renaissance Electric Music.

It was round about this time that Michael approached me. I was too busy to take him on at the time, although I did give him that tip about the superfluous R. I heard him out, too; I think he was looking for someone to confide in as much as a high-powered and well-connected music business insider. He felt guilty to be leaving his family in the lurch, but he knew deep down that his career had to come first. “Leaving the Stripe Family is the end of the world as I know it,” he mused. “And yet, I feel fine.” I broke in at this stage and told him I had to go; I had Lester Bangs on the other line, wanting to discuss some harebrained scheme for getting Leonard Bernstein involved in a musical based on the lives of Leonid Brezhnev and Lenny Bruce. Never came to anything, needless to say.

Leaving the family – and losing the R – did Michael nothing but good, of course. As for the Stripe Family, they soldiered on without him. Around this time Jackie had a growth spurt, started dying his hair and became slightly less irritating, which let Shirley promote him to the lead spot. She left the band herself soon afterwards. The late nights and the retsina had taken their toll, but I think the conflict with Georgia and Basil Strype was the last straw. Shirley was reduced to defining the band by their appearance – by their ethnicity, even: “No, no, no,” she’d sigh, “we’re the white Stripes.” After she left, I believe little Jackie tried to keep the band going without a keyboard player; indeed, by that stage there was nobody else left in the band but his cousin Margaret. Strange boy – I wonder what became of him.

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Author’s note: this was the last instalment I wrote, and I think you can tell that inspiration was flagging. I hesitated over including parts of the David Bow post, and I’ve hesitated over including pretty much all of this one; completeness won out in the end. If you do remember Sir Frederick, remember him in better times.

Remembering Judy Garland: You Are The Quarry Men

I’ll never forget Judy Garland: there was someone who truly bestrode the world of light entertainment like a colossus. A bloated and wobbly colossus in later years, admittedly, but a colossus for all that.

But then, there were giants in those days. I’ve got particularly fond memories of the Merseybeat scene: Billy and his Dakotas, Freddy and his Dreamers, Ken and his Diddymen… I was lucky enough to rub shoulders with the biggest group of them all, although this was before those four lovable mop-heads hit the big time. People have called me the fifth Beatle, but I can’t really claim that title; in my time the boys were still trading as the Quarry Men. The sixth Quarry Man, that was me.

And yes, there were five of them in those days: John, Paul, George, Ringo and Stan. Ringo McGonagall played drums, of course, and his brother Stan – what did Stan do? Well, what didn’t he do? At this distance I’m not sure either way, to be honest, but it seemed to work at the time. Hamburg changed everything, though. When they got the offer Stan dug his heels in and said he wasn’t going – didn’t want anything to do with ‘the Germans’, apparently – and then Ringo walked out in solidarity.

Well, as the Quarry Men they’d had quite a set worked out, with a few standards and some of their own material: “PS I love you”, “Tomorrow never knows”, “We are the Quarry Men (Hey Hey)”… Working without a drummer, and without Stan, that all had to change. Initially the boys attempted a radical new direction, abandoning regular rhythms altogether in favour of a prototypical ambient sound. They even took a new name, ‘the Beatless’. After a while they bowed down to convention and got a new drummer, but the name more or less stuck. Terrible scenes, there were, when they wheeled out the Best chap on drums. I can still hear the fans chanting ‘We want Ringo!’

But Ringo was back in Liverpool, as indeed he is to this day. Once the boys had changed their name, the way was clear for him and Stan to revive the Quarry Men moniker. And they’ve kept it going to this day, with the addition of various new members on keyboards, guitar, bass, drums and vocals. They’re actually working separately now, sad to say; Stan’s relocated to Manchester, and Ringo’s outfit goes out as The Scouse Quarry Men. He and Stan don’t speak. There were never any hard feelings between Stan and the boys who went to Hamburg, though; he would often say that he was their biggest fan.

When you keep a band going for forty years, you can imagine that quite a lot of young musicians pass through the ranks. And so it was with Stan McGonagall and his Quarry Men: apparently the lineup of the Hollies, the Chameleons and the Happy Mondays consists very largely of former Quarry Men. Not to mention the Smiths. As it happens, I broached this very topic with Morrissey the other day. He’s living in Los Angeles these days, is old Morrie. In a tree. Well, not in a tree, that would be ridiculous – it’s more of a treehouse. Lovely place – all mod cons, central heating, Vimto on tap. I was shown around the place by Morrie’s majordomo, local chap named Hector. At least, I think he was the majordomo – he said something to the effect that it was actually his house, but I didn’t like to pry.

They made me feel very much at home, anyway – Hector shakes a mean Vimtini, let me tell you. Perhaps it was the drink talking, but at one point I asked old Morrie what had gone wrong – why wasn’t he the big star he used to be? He wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. He glared at me, brandished an old Smiths 12” and said, with great aplomb, “Sir Frederick, I’m still big – it’s just the records that have got small.”

I apologised, of course, and Morrie was soon his old charming self again. Apparently the restricted dimensions of CD packaging are a genuine concern for him. His last album, for instance – Morrie and his old bandmates have never really got on, as you know, and the title of the album was meant to be one last dig at their journeyman background: “You are the Quarry Men”. When the roughs came back, the desingers had chopped off the last word so as to fit it all in. Morrie was distraught, as you can imagine. He dashed off a quick number to serve as the title track –

“You are the quarry
Just a great big hole in the ground
You make no sound
Just an unattractive hole in the ground
Oho, oho…”

Someone at the record company didn’t like it, though, and the song never saw the light of day. I believe it’s going to be on his forthcoming collection of B-sides and rarities, “These are the Songs you Never Deserved to Hear (Hey Hey)”. It’s something to look forward to.

Remembering Judy Garland: The David Bow Story

I’ll never forget Judy Garland. Few singers have ever presented such a complex, even contradictory image. I never knew whether she was going to be a hard-bitten hound dog or a friendly, approachable teddy-bear. One minute she’d look at you with the suspicious mind of a jailhouse rocker in blue suede shoes; the next, she would be every inch a laughing gnome.

As I think of Judy, one other name comes insistently to mind: I’m thinking, of course, of David Bow. I should say that the stage name was my idea. David’s real name, David Jones, gave him nothing but trouble: some people confused him with Davey Jones of the Monkees, others assumed he must be Welsh. The crowning humiliation was when he was booked on the same bill with a Welsh Monkees tribute band, the Myncis, all four of whom were in fact called David Jones. Something had to give. I thought ‘Bow’ would be particularly appropriate in the light of David’s fascination with the work of Anthony Newley and all things Cockney: it would suggest that he too hailed from within the sound of Bow Bells.

Alas, my belief that David’s name had kept his audience from appreciating the quality of his work proved ill-founded. It turned out that his audience was well aware of the quality of his work, which in all honesty was minimal. “The Laughing Gnome”, “Love You Till Tuesday”, “Whoops Cor Blimey Stone The Crows (What A Palaver)” – all these songs languished in obscurity for some years. “Whoops”, in particular, has never been recorded at all, as far as I’m aware. I have tried to place it with a number of people – Denis Waterman; Frank Bruno; Morrissey – but, sadly, nobody wants to know. What a palaver, indeed.

The ‘Bow’ name didn’t work, anyway. And it’s my belief that geographical stage names are rarely appropriate in show business. Take Scott Walker – nobody took the slightest notice of him when he was going out as Little Scottie Winchester. Although, now I think of it, that’s not entirely true. There is that odd story of Scottie’s chance meeting with a mysterious stranger – a meeting in which his stage name played an important part. For years, Scottie refused to say who he’d met that day on the south coast, referring to her only as ‘that fascinating creature’. I can now reveal that this ‘creature’ went on to play the bass guitar with the Talking Heads.

What’s more, she acquired her own stage name that day. As a stranger to these parts, she misunderstood Scottie’s name, you see; she thought he was simply claiming that he lived in Winchester and was a Scot (or perhaps a Scottie). Naturally she followed suit, becoming ‘Martian Weymouth’. A slip of the pen in the registrar’s office turned ‘Martian’ to ‘Martina’, and the rest is history. Tina’s had her critics; it’s been suggested that the down-and-dirty funk basslines of the Talking Heads’ later work are beyond the capabilities of a white female human musician. It’s a tremendously unfair criticism, I’ve often felt.

At this time, Scottie’s own career was approaching its first great turning-point. His New Vaudeville Band were about to release “Winchester Cathedral”, Scott’s signature tune and a homage to his home town. The record was to open with jocular whistling and some oompah clarinet, after which Scott came in:

Winchester Cathedral
So grey and so old
Out there in your graveyard
My baby lies cold

The rest of the Vaudevillers felt that this wasn’t quite the thing, you know, and it wasn’t long before Scott left the band and, indeed, left Winchester. The next time he surfaced he’d teamed up with another two singers, the brothers Mario and Luigi Walker. And so the Super Walker Brothers were born – but that’s another story for another day.

‘David Bow’ didn’t last, either. I remember David was pacing up and down my office one day, raging at the relative – and indeed absolute – failure of his work to date. Eventually I blurted out, “Maybe you just need to do something a bit less ‘David Bow’-y.” Now David, as you know, has one ear permanently bigger than the other – an unfortunate result of a childhood boxing accident – and it so happened that he had his bad ear towards me at that moment. “That’s it!” he cried. “I’ll change my sound and call myself David Bowie!” Which, of course, he did, with a bit of help from the likes of young Frankie Fellini.

I never saw him much after that. But I’m not bitter. He left me with some fond memories; he also left me with the publishing rights to “Whoops”, which I think is going to be very big one of these days. In fact I’m expecting a call back from Scottie as I write. It’s about time someone did him a good turn.

Remembering Judy Garland: Jim Jim Morrison Morrison

I’ll never forget Judy Garland. She had a childlike quality, never more pronounced than in her early films. Watching Judy in the Wizard of Oz, you felt that this was someone who, in a real sense, had not yet fully entered upon her twenties. It’s a rare quality in actors, and particularly remarkable in one so young.

It was a quality she shared, like so much else, with Jimmy Gumdrop. Yes, it’s an unlikely surname, and there were those who were convinced that Jimmy, like Judy herself, had been born a Gumm – or perhaps in his case a Dropp, you could argue it either way. It wasn’t true; I worked with Jimmy for many years, and I can assure you that he objected strenuously if any aspersions were cast on his ancestral handle. He came from a long line of Gumdrops, you know the sort of thing – there were Gumdrops on the Mayflower, and so forth. He even had family in the old country, although Jimmy’s relations with them were strained; they didn’t approve of his lifestyle, you know. Damn them, I remember Jimmy fairly yelling at me across the dressing-room one night – damn those goody-goody Gumdrops!

You don’t much hear the name of Gumdrop these days, and for that I must take some of the blame. It was I, you understand, who introduced Jimmy to the works of A. A. Milne. They were a revelation to Jimmy: he’d never read anything like it before in his life. In fact, Jimmy hadn’t read anything at all in his life: his father, you see, was a strict disciplinarian of somewhat old-fashioned views, and he thought that a conventional school education would give Jimmy ‘ideas’. I was never really sure whether the old man had a particular type of idea in mind, or simply objected to rational thought in any form.

In any case, being stranded on an iceberg and brought up by seals left Jimmy with very few ideas of any kind. When I introduced him to the Hundred-Acre Wood and the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the effect was electric. Several of his most famous songs actually date from that encounter, at least in their original form. You’ll know “The Crystal Butterdish”, of course:

Before you spread my bread with marmalade
I’d like to ask the dairymaid
If there’s some butter for my bread
That’s what I said – just for my bread

Jimmy was particularly fascinated with the name “A. A. Milne”. After he’d had a few slices he used to refer to him as “Ma Alien” – loved his anagrams, did Jimmy – or “Hey Hey, Milne!”. He actually started to write a song around that second phrase, but he didn’t get very far before he was stuck for a rhyme.

Hey, hey, Milne!
Let’s open up your kiln!
Let’s break up all your pottery!

That was pretty much it. A few days later I came up with ‘lottery’, but Jimmy said the moment had gone.

By then, though, he wasn’t plain old Jimmy Gumdrop any more. You see, Jimmy was obsessed with that poem about the little boy whose mother goes down to the end of the town – I think it reminded him of an occasion in his childhood, when a seal he was particularly fond of disappeared for several days. (He never did find out where she’d been. Taciturn creatures, your seals.) Eventually he prevailed upon the guitarist and the drummer – Robbie thingummy and Sly whatsit, you know – to change their names to ‘Wetherby’ and ‘George Dupree’; he, of course, was James James Morrison Morrison, or “Mr Mojo Marjoram Resin Session”. (I’d rather not talk about Jimmy’s marjoram resin sessions.)

The problem came with the other chap, Manzanilla, Manzanera – Ray Manzarek, that’s the fellow. Around this time young Ray was going by ‘Raimondo’. It was another of Jimmy’s anagrams that did it – ‘Raimondo Manzarek’ is a near-perfect anagram of ‘Mr Amazonian Dork’. I never knew what it meant myself, but I gathered that this was very much the positive sense of the word ‘dork’. Hard to imagine now. Actually it was quite hard to imagine then, but one did one’s best. In any case, little Ray wouldn’t go along with the whole Milne-related naming scheme; he and one of the other chaps could have split ‘George’ and ‘Dupree’ between them, but no. So for a while the posters said something along the lines of

TONIGHT
AT THE
WHISKEY-A-GO-GO
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON
MORRISON
WETHERBY
GEORGE DUPREE
FEATURING
THE ELITE ORGAN STYLINGS OF
RAY
‘RAIMONDO’
MANZAREK
$1/50c BEFORE 10
DOORS 7:30

Around that time Jimmy had been unlucky enough to secure the services of one of the hot new names in poster design – Hashbash and his Coat Coloured Brown, or Nigel Brown as we knew him back in Guildford. If you’ve seen any of Nigel’s work from the period, you can imagine what he could do with that much text. The repro technology of the time didn’t help, although to be honest that fauve-on-ganache colour scheme is difficult to bring off even now. The end result was that nobody could read a damn thing, frankly. The proprietor of the Whiskey – Mr Gogo, I suppose he was, we were never close – well, he was furious. He sent some people round with strips of paper to stick on to the posters, to make sure the essential information got across. “BAND AT THE WHISKEY $1 DOORS 7:30”

We all know what happened next. The show was a huge success, and the name stuck. Later, of course, the One-Dollar Doors became the plain old Doors, and James James Morrison Morrison became plain old James Morrison, or “Mr Major Noises”. But that’s another story for another day.

Remembering Judy Garland: ‘Serge’ Gainsbourg

I’ll never forget Judy Garland. So few artistes have the compassion that she so often showed. That poor man, I remember she said to me once – he’s been cleaning all those windows and now he’s leaning on a lamp post at the corner of the street, doesn’t he ever get to sit down? She actually sought out George Formby and sent him a note, with a signed photograph and a rather nice armchair. I don’t know what became of it, though, I never actually worked with George.

Our paths did cross once, now I think of it, over a matter of pastiche and travesty rights. Remember young Alfie Gainsborough? Much the finest ex-Services George Formby impressionist of his day, on the Wirral circuit at least. To begin with he didn’t have the clothes for the part, you see, and after a time we made a feature of it – we got him billed as ‘Khaki’ Gainsborough. Worked like a charm – they loved him in Heswall, I can tell you. (Well, they clapped.)

Anyway, Alfie lugged his ukulele up and down the A540 for a couple of years, but after a while he decided to look further afield. So we relaunched him in France. He had to make a few changes, obviously: the uke had to go, for a start. The songs got a lot slower, and of course their lyrics had to be translated into French, pretty much in their entirety. Even then, they didn’t really take to him. Eventually I realised the name was giving us problems: we’d changed everything else, but Alfie was still going out with an English name. So out went ‘Khaki’ Gainsborough and in came ‘Serge’ Gainsbourg.

The rest of course is history: where Heswall led, the Left Bank could only follow. As time went by Alfie had more and more difficulties adapting the old George Formby material; he often told me he was working on a new version of ‘the window song’, but nothing ever came of it. That said, one of Alfie’s biggest hits was adapted from an old Formby number, albeit one that George’s people would never let him release – it was called “When I’m Between Your Kidneys”. Racy little number, as I recall.

That was with the Birkin girl, of course. Lovely girl – daughter of a judge, I believe. She’d known Alfie back home, you see, and quite by chance she ran into him in Paris one day. She was quite taken aback by his appearance, apparently, and she blurted out, “Qu’est-ce que c’est donc de quoi il s’agit dans l’ensemble, Alfie?” She was concerned that he’d become a little too French, you see; she wanted him to lose the strings of onions, you know, and the stripey jumper, and the red wine and the Gauloises and the womanising. I suppose one out of five isn’t too bad.

Marvellous career, he had, Alfie – influential in all sorts of ways. Take young Whitney Houston – she’d never have had that big hit of hers if not for Alfie. She actually jotted down the first draft straight after their meeting; it was originally called “I Will Always Love You (If You’ll Get This Ghastly Frenchman Out Of My Face)”. But do you know, ‘the window song’ evaded Alfie to the last. In the end he handed it over to an old Forces friend who’d also set up on the Continent – Jack ‘Clanger’ Bell (or ‘Clanger’ Brel as he preferred to be known by that time). Old Clanger turned it round in no time:

Les oiseaux noirs du désespoir
Ne chantent pas seulement pour toi –
Ils chantent doucement pour moi,
Quand je lave les fenêtres!

“The black birds of despair sing sweetly for me, when I’m cleaning windows” – rather nice in its way. They wouldn’t have it in Hoylake, mind you. Funny thing, years later little Dirk McCartney got hold of that song and tried to translate it back into English. Missed the whole point, though – lost the windows for one thing. No professionalism, these youngsters.

Remembering Judy Garland: ‘Klaxon’ Jackson

I’ll never forget Judy Garland. Judy was unlike any other actor I’ve ever known. As I remember, she was particularly unlike Samuel L. Jackson – ‘Klaxon’ Jackson, as I called him. But that’s another story.

Dear Samuel had his wilderness years, of course. When I first knew him he actually lived in the wilderness – one used to see him walking down roughly-beaten country tracks, wearing an ill-fitting hat and talking to himself. He never strayed off the beaten track, though, even then. Pulp Friction changed everything. And yes, that was the title; people say now it was that film Samuel did with the boy Tarantino that changed everything, but I know better. In my business, you see quite a few instructional films from industrial liquidiser and blender firms, but that one really stood out. “Gahooga!” When I heard that, I knew I had to work with this man. Ultimately it was the boy Tarantino who reaped the reward, but one doesn’t like to bear grudges; I feel he’s suffered enough.

Dear Quentin’s a great personal friend and a longstanding client. I remember one Friday afternoon; he’d come round for his regular foot massage, and we started talking about film plots. What I’d like to see, I said, would be a film told mainly in flashback, framed with sequences in which an undercover cop is bleeding to death following a failed robbery. The role should be taken by a British actor, I said – Simon Russell Beale, say, or Simon Callow, or perhaps Simon Cadell; I felt that the part called for a Simon. Now, I’m not claiming any great originality for this suggestion; indeed, Reservoir Dogs was out at the time, so I dare say the idea had occurred to Quentin himself at some stage. But I like to think I played some small part in helping the boy towards a glittering career. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, I signed Samuel on the strength of the blender film, and I started pitching a little idea of mine. ‘Klaxon’ Jackson was the name of the film and the name of the character; you’d see him trawling the streets of San Francisco in an ill-fitting wig, looking to settle some scores with a rogue trichologist. “Gahooga!” That was his catchphrase, you see. This was just after that Pacino film with all the hoo-hah, Whiff of a Lady or whatever it was, so I felt the public was ready. I even had a theme song:

“Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?”
“‘Klaxon’ Jackson!”
“Gahooga!”

It could have turned Samuel’s career around. The poster was going to say:

‘KLAXON’ JACKSON
Starring Samuel “‘Klaxon’ Jackson” Jackson as “‘Klaxon’ ‘”Klaxon” Jackson’ Jackson”

The movie spent three years in Punctuation Hell, and by the time it was greenlighted we’d all moved on. I’ve still got the blender film somewhere. I’ll never forget it – after Samuel delivers his last line, he smiles, then turns and takes a sip of a freshly-made wheatgrass and aubergine smoothie. Then he says it: “Gahooga!”

Dear Samuel, I hope he’s well; the last time I saw him he was walking down a country track in an ill-fitting hat, muttering something about a pig. The man’s a true professional, though. That wig he wore in the boy Tarantino’s film? He wore that thing from the beginning of the shoot to the end, in every single shot in which he appeared – even if he didn’t have any lines. They don’t teach you that in drama school.

“Ditch the rainbow song!” Introducing the Bodine papers

What follows is my first venture into blogging – or rather, self-publication through blogging – dating back nearly 20 years. The posts which will appear over the next couple of days first appeared between May 2003 and September 2004.  I had some vague idea of getting them published more widely, but it never came to anything; I pitched one to Word (who said ‘thanks but no thanks’) and then to Mojo (who said ‘not quite our style, try Word‘). I did get one of them published, though, in an anthology of the year’s best blogging (hard to imagine now, and to be honest I don’t think it was a big seller then). Otherwise they’ve only been available on their original Blogspot blog, which is now unavailable (thanks, Google!).

On re-reading I found that they include quite a few jokes that don’t now land, either because what they’re referring to is no longer topical or because boundaries of taste have moved. (Not that the humour here is bad taste, exactly, but when the boundaries of taste move the boundaries of ‘arch, self-consciously witty and just slightly edgy’ move along with them.) But I think enough has survived to make these posts worth extracting from the Wayback Machine and presenting here.

Without further ado, here are some fragments of a life lived in theatreland, clubland, Hollywoodland and the Land of Green Ginger: the memoirs of Sir Frederick Bodine.

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“Ditch the rainbow song!”

The words were mine, all those many years ago; those sad, misguided words were mine. Fortunately for all concerned, my advice was ignored, as it would be so often in the future. But that’s another story for another day.

Of course, dear Judy didn’t ditch ‘the rainbow song’; indeed, it would be associated with her name for many years to come. It affords me a crumb of solace to note that the song was heavily edited before recording, eliminating most if not all of the elements to which I had objected. Even the title had to change – “Have yourself a merry little rainbow”, what sense does that make? None! None, I say!

These, then, are my memories of a life in the green room; a life which I can truly say has been lived among the stars; a life that’s full, in which I’ve travelled each and every byway. But more, much more than this.

Against excellence in teaching

I wrote this brief piece, for a collection that never happened, back in 2010. There was no Teaching Excellence Framework back then, although the idea of excellence as something to aim for in teaching was clearly already in the air. (People don’t seem to have avoided marks ending in 9 back then, either.) This blog isn’t a great place to air an argument about teaching, but it’s better than leaving it sitting on my hard drive.

Against excellence! (Or, ‘good enough’ is good enough)

As a student, I was taught by some genuinely excellent teachers. One in particular stands out. He gave every impression of being thoroughly bored with his subject and the class (and doubtless wasn’t putting it on), but had huge reserves of knowledge and enthusiasm which he would, reluctantly, draw on if you asked the right question. He took me on one side once and urged me to consider doing further study; the piece of work I’d handed in the previous week was one of the best things he’d seen in years, he said, and the last person who’d handed in something of that quality was now a lecturer. The mark he gave it was 69.

Measuring excellence in teaching raises problems on a number of levels. While it may be directly observable, it can’t be directly measured: proxy measures are required. It’s hard to see what proxy measures would be both reliable and valid. As my experience suggests, the reliability of academic results can be undermined by the variation between generous and parsimonious markers; other confounding factors include the variation between one year cohort and another and the inescapable and unpredictable variation between one teaching year and another.

Standardised feedback measures avoid some of these pitfalls, but have their own drawbacks in terms of validity. Any measure which offers students the chance to express their feelings about their teachers is liable at best to be distorted by personal factors – and at worst, to be gamed outright. A teacher who consistently praises every student who speaks in class, never contradicting or offering correction, will be better liked overall – and get better overall feedback – than one who engages with students by correcting misconceptions and prompting them to clarify their ideas.

Moreover, excellent teaching does not necessarily indicate a consistently excellent teacher. Two undergraduate course units I have known showed striking differences in teaching methods and equally striking differences in the key student-based measures, results and feedback. One unit featured lectures designed to engage students in multiple different ways, using graphics, animations and interactive exercises. The other offered students the chance to listen and take notes for 100 minutes at a time, while contemplating text-based slides varied only by colour-coded headings.

One unit had excellent results and enthusiastic student feedback; the other, mediocre results and dreadful feedback. The teacher was the same person (myself); nor can the teaching methods be blamed, as it was the second, less interactive unit which had the good results and feedback. One relevant factor is that the first unit was compulsory and the second optional; another is that the first was a ‘methods’ unit. Perhaps the most important difference is that the first unit had been taught for several years with only minor changes, while the second had just been developed from scratch.

An excellent teacher is, perhaps, one who communicates enthusiasm for and curiosity about the subject. However, this is a quality of a particular teaching situation, not of the teacher involved. Anybody, in the right situation, has the capacity to communicate enthusiasm; nobody can succeed in doing so in every situation. The quality of being an excellent teacher, in this sense, is a chimera – and the data produced by trying to trap it with standardised measurements is liable to be misleading at best.

The work of the psychologist Donald Winnicott is relevant here; in particular, his model of the relationship between the infant and the ‘good-enough mother’. A key concept is ‘potential space’: the psychological zone of possibilities between infant and carer. This must be created and maintained by a ‘good-enough’ caregiver: “If the caregiver interferes with and dominates the space, then the space and its potential are compromised. If the caregiver is negligent, there will be no defined, protected space where ‘the work of play’ can happen.” (Allen 2002: 151) Teachers, similarly, “create environments of one sort or another … Teachers can, like parents, neglect, overwhelm, support, protect, or threaten their charges.” (Allen 2002: 152)

However, what is at issue is not simply creating a safe space, for infant or student. In the course of infant development, the ‘good-enough’ caregiver becomes a less significant part of the infant’s ‘potential space’; as the infant grows in independence, the play itself becomes more real. “The good-enough mother … starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure” (Winnicott 1974: 12). Something similar may apply to teachers:

we might say that the “good enough teacher” is one who provides the circumstances for the student to use the teacher’s presence and absence for her own flourishing … The good enough teacher is one who proves to be enough of a presence so that the student can be sure that she has a person to fall back on if needed, but also enough of an absence that the student can gain an educational agency that is all her own. (Bingham 2004: 249)

It is the teacher’s responsibility to create an imaginative space within which the student can safely experiment with new ways of thinking, and then to progressively withdraw from that space, enabling the student to emerge as an independent learner. The initial state of responsive and understanding ‘presence’ is important, but so is the later ‘absence’ – which can be understood both literally and in terms of resistance, independence of mind, responding to queries in ways which the student may not find immediately useful. To be ‘good enough’ in practice, it is crucial to recognise what point an individual student has reached in the journey out of a state of dependence – and to help the student continue the journey.

Excellence as a teacher cannot be measured validly and reliably, and may not even exist. We should focus instead on being ‘good enough’, developing relationships with students which move from attentive ‘presence’ to resistant ‘absence’ – not a spectacular achievement, but one which makes learning possible.

References

Bingham, C. (2004), “Pragmatic Intersubjectivity, or, Just Using Teachers”, Philosophy of Education 60:245-253

Allen, G. (2002), “The ‘good enough’ teacher and the authentic student’; in Mills, J. (ed.) (2002), A pedagogy of becoming, New York: Rodopi

Winnicott, D. (1953), “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34:89-97

Give everybody eat!

Those of my many readers (not only in this country but around the world) who are Labour Party members will be aware that we’ve just been offered a new loyalty oath to sign. Well, not an ‘oath’ as such but a “newly enhanced Code of Conduct – Member’s pledge”:

We have updated the Member’s Pledge to remind all our members that the values of honesty and decency, and maintaining high standards in public life, must be fundamental to everything we do in the Labour Party.

Who exactly ‘we’ is isn’t clear, although Anneliese Dodds assures us that “[t]he new Member’s Pledge is endorsed at the highest levels of the party … [by] Keir Starmer, Leader of the Party, David Evans, General Secretary and Johanna Baxter, Chair of the NEC”. Nor are we individual members being invited to sign it as such, just to “read and embrace” it. That said, if (having read it) we don’t feel moved to clasp it to our collective bosom, we may be out of luck with regard to continued membership of this great party of ours:

By following this Code, I will help to ensure an inclusive, safe and constructive environment within the Labour Party.

I understand that if found to be in breach of the Labour Party’s codes of conduct, guidelines, policies and procedures on online and offline abuse, and if I fail to treat those I encounter with respect and courtesy, I will be subject to, and may be sanctioned in accordance with, the rules and procedures of the Labour Party.

It’s messily worded, but I think what that’s saying is that Labour members may be sanctioned if they fail to treat people respectfully and courteously or they are found to be in breach of the party’s codes of conduct – including the Pledge.

So what’s in the pledge – what are we going to get booted for not doing? Here’s how the Pledge opens:

I pledge to act within the spirit and rules of the Labour Party in my conduct both on and offline, with members and non-members and I stand against all forms of abuse.

I commit to treating all those I encounter with respect and courtesy whether or not they are in the Labour Party or a member of the public.

Seems fair enough, really. And specifically?

Whilst I am at Labour Party meetings, on the doorstep, in a campaigning environment, on social media or in any Labour Party gathering, I will:

• Listen to others’ viewpoints, participate inclusively, challenge appropriately.
• Conduct reasoned arguments and not talk over others.
• Use constructive criticism consistent with Labour’s values.
• Always act in an appropriate and respectful manner to others.
• Take care to use appropriate, non-offensive language.

The devil’s in the detail – these formulations about ‘appropriate’ language and acting in an ‘appropriate’ manner are particularly broad – but, again, this doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. I think my only question would be whether talking over others, criticising destructively, acting inappropriately etc are enough of a problem in the Labour Party to need dealing with in this way. The inclusion of social media in the list of settings where members need to behave themselves is also rather odd, particularly given that there’s no stipulation that members need to behave themselves online when they’re representing the party. This raises the spectre of the dreaded disciplinary social media trawl, and of members being expelled on the grounds that they called their local councillor a c**t on Twitter in 2004. But trawling Twitter won’t be possible once Musk has got it locked up, and in any case fewer people calling other people c**ts on social media would be all to the good.

So it’s hard to object too strongly to the main body of the Pledge. But then we come to the final commitment:

Finally, I will not organise to drown out the views of others recognising the unfairness this creates.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to read it literally and conclude that the Labour Party has gone to the trouble of banning the practice of organising people to heckle and shout down their opponents within the party – to which the only possible response would be Really? That’s our problem?

A less literal – perhaps less naïve – reading would be that the key word here isn’t ‘drown’ but ‘organise’. Any time a group of people arrive at a Labour Party meeting already intending to vote a certain way, and knowing that they all intend to vote that way, it could be argued that they’re aiming to “drown out the views of others”. Think of the individual members who have come along to hear the speakers and make up their minds on the night! How are they going to feel if, when they’ve said their piece about a proposal they’ve only just heard about, somebody gets up and attacks the proposal knowledgeably and in detail, and in the same terms as the person who spoke before them? They’re certainly going to feel that their views aren’t being heard. And how did the members of that group get to be so knowledgeable – indeed, how did they know that they were all going to vote against the proposal? They organised, that’s what they did – they organised, outside the meeting, with the intention of winning the vote by making ordinary members of the party listen to them. In short: they organised to drown out the views of others (presumably not recognising the unfairness this creates).

If I’m right about this it’s something of a cynical master-stroke: no more messing about identifying which organisations are incompatible with the aims of the Labour Party and who’s involved in them, just ban the lot of them; ban them for organising. Nor will this only apply to Momentum, or to the (numerically tiny) left entryist organisations of the old school; scraping together contact details for left-leaning members in a party branch, then inviting those people to meet in a pub, will be grounds enough for ‘sanctioning’ everyone involved.

If I’m right about this it’s going to ramp up the exodus of the Left, which had slowed to a trickle recently; indeed, it’s going to become impossible to remain in the Labour Party while taking part in any kind of factional activity, unless it’s a faction that supports the leadership. (Which, ironically, were just the factions that were having a hard time of it, only a few years ago.)

In short, if I’m right about this Anneliese Dodds – together with Keir Starmer, David Evans and that arch-opponent of factionalism Johanna Baxter – have just proscribed the Labour Party opposition. Any Labour Party opposition.

I only hope I’m not right about this.

Wouldn’t start from here

Much as I dislike giving any publicity to “newsletters” (or any other way of monetising the blogosphere), this piece by Jonn Elledge has been nagging at me since I first read it a week or so ago. Elledge opens by asking:

what do you imagine my politics are? Where do I fit? … The reason I ask is I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I can list policy preferences … but what name to give the resulting package I don’t know. Maybe this is just because I’ve never been an activist, and thus have never got into the sort of factional battles that result in you defining or being defined as one thing or the other.

Elledge goes on to argue that “the boxes don’t actually fit”, and that the box that fits him best is “soft Left”; he squares this circle by suggesting that the label of “soft Left” – as well as applying to people who are firmly convinced that they are in fact “soft Left” – may also designate a whole range of people who have left-wing commitments but hold them with a sceptical, loosely-bundled, engaged-but-not-committed attitude. (And that this is a good way to be, of course.)

Well, maybe – but let’s go back a bit. I’m sceptical about this idea of not ‘fitting’. Not feeling as if you fit is one thing – a very common thing – but actually fitting (or not) is another. As I wrote in this piece from the period of the first Corbyn leadership election, nobody who wants to achieve anything in politics acts entirely alone, or speaks solely for him- or herself, for the simple reason that acting alone achieves nothing. (It may get you re-elected, it may even get you into the papers, but it won’t achieve anything – not unless what you’re saying or doing gets taken up by your party, by the government or by some other group of people who are acting collectively.) So politics is about having allies – indeed, it’s about assembling allies, and achieving a rough match between the group of things you want to achieve and the different things your allies value most highly.

In this perspective, though, the question of where I “fit” – or where any political actor (including political commentators like Jonn Elledge) “fits” – is trivial, because “fit” is an active verb. Where you fit is where you want to fit and try to fit: you fit in with A rather than B by making an effort to go to A’s meetings and push A’s arguments rather than B’s. You may claim that this isn’t really you – you never got into factional battles, you aren’t strongly committed either way – but that only gets you so far, because what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting. You may claim that you’re equally interested in traditional songs and traditional music, but if you go to song sessions once a week and you haven’t been to a tunes session since before lockdown, people may reasonably conclude otherwise. Equally, anything you believe that you don’t act on, with other people, is only of interest to you; you can’t really claim you’re a staunch republican if you never talk about the royal family outside your own home. What you do, not what you think, is where you fit: no one who writes for the New Statesman and not Tribune is neutral between those two publications’ political positions, even if they’ve been thinking for a while that they’d rather like to write for Tribune.

All this suggests that Elledge is entitled to claim “soft Left” as the label of his preferred group, but not to claim that it means something along the lines of “holding left-wing positions in a judicious and detached way” – not least because such an attitude would be basically pointless and of no interest to anyone else. Even those who claim to have this kind of attitude are in practice working with other people, making it possible to see where they ‘fit’ – those who anyone’s heard of, anyway. (And yes, I have heard of George Orwell; he wrote for Tribune, he fought with POUM, he collaborated with the CCF and IRD.)

Can we define ‘soft Left’ any more precisely? In that piece from 2015 I said quite a lot about the “soft Left” label, and about my own journey in the early 00s from (vaguely) soft Left to (reluctantly) hard Left. I argued then that the division between “soft” and “hard” Left was “at once very deep and very impermanent, like a crevasse in sand” and that there was “something cultural – almost temperamental” about it. I related my own changing position to Kosovo and Iraq: “the old soft Left has ended up positively committed to supporting aggressive wars conducted by imperialist powers”. This, I suggested, brought an opposition into play that was different from, and bigger than, the differences of priorities and emphasis that had fuelled past divisions between soft and hard Left:

If Jeremy Corbyn wins this election, he’ll be the first genuinely anti-imperialist leader of the Labour Party for a long time – possibly the first ever. Many people, unfortunately, will oppose him for that reason. I just wish they’d acknowledge that they do oppose him for that reason .. Maybe … this isn’t just another case of rivalry within the Left. Maybe we’re not actually on the same side here.

If you want to fund large-print purchases for the library and I want to fund food banks, we’re rivals. If you want to bring freedom to Afghanistan (or anywhere else) on the point of a bayonet and I want to bring the troops home, we’re not actually rivals – we’re opponents.

All of this suggests three different ways of looking at the “soft Left”/”hard Left” division, to which my experience since 2015 as a Labour Party member adds a fourth:

1. Ideological: revolution, yea or nay? Which side are you on when it comes to the big stuff?
2. Political: what do you want the next Labour government to do? How far and how fast should they go?
3. Cultural: do you identify with the “hard Left” (i.e. Corbyn) or the “soft Left” (i.e. not Corbyn)?
4. Organisational: are you a Trot (actual or suspected) or someone who will fight the Trots?

These aren’t hard-and-fast categories so much as a blurry spectrum; both 1. & 2. and 3. and 4. have a lot in common with each other. (Arguably so do 2. and 3., but let’s not over-complicate things.)

The distinction between 1. and 2. – “are you an anti-imperialist or are you committed to Britain’s existing alliances?” versus “would you bring in a 50% tax on high earners or leave it at 45%?” – seems clear enough, but applying it in practice is far from being an exact science. A mistake people often make – and which my argument in that 2015 piece fell into to some extent – is assuming that there’s a bright line to be drawn between issues of principle, which are broad, distinct, stable and generally visible from space (“Capitalism (with reforms) or socialism (via revolution)?”), and political issues, which are made up of insignificant minutiae. The reality is that defining the scope and content of those issues of principle is itself a deeply political issue.

Ideological disagreements don’t come ready-labelled either as “good-faith divergence within a commitment to shared principles” or as “fundamental disagreement precluding one side ever working with the other again”; those labels have to be applied. Suppose I believe in principle {X} and key policy issues {a} and {b}, and your beliefs are different from mine. I don’t ask whether what you’re talking about is policy issue {c} (potentially compatible with {X}) or a completely distinct principle {Y}: the fact that the belief you’re professing relates to a policy issue, rather than constituting a principle in its own right, isn’t in dispute. The judgment I make is whether you believe in {c} as part of a version of {X}, or conversely whether believing in {c} shows that you can’t possibly believe in {X} even if you claim to. And that’s a question that can be answered different ways, even for the same {c} and the same {X}: whether disagreements are understood as good-faith divergences (etc) depends on… well, it depends on whether that’s how we understand them or not.

I think Elledge’s version of the ‘soft left’ grasps this to some extent – specifically, to the extent of approving of the first, inclusive alternative and disapproving of the second. The trouble is, drawing lines in this way isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do: people do have red lines (even you; even Jonn Elledge), and sometimes people do in fact claim to be on the same side as you while also having beliefs that cross those lines. The judgment that anyone who believes {c} can’t possibly be a genuine believer in X (and hence isn’t one of us) is often made cynically, but it can be made with complete sincerity.

So there isn’t a hard-and-fast line between the principles ({X} and {Y}) of point 1. and the policies ({a}, {b} and {c}) of point 2. – or rather, there is in theory, but it’s not reliable in practice. (In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Thanks, I’m here all week.) What we can say is that there are times of lower and higher polarisation within the Left – times when different factions on the Left are more, and less, willing to think in terms of lower-case policy differences within shared upper-case principles – and that we’re currently in a period of higher polarisation.

The questions in points 3. and 4 also look distinct, and also have a tendency to bleed into each other. At first blush “Soft Left” certainly seems like a real thing, with definite reference points – the current version of the New Statesman, the old version of Tribune, Andy Burnham, Compass, electoral reform, that kind of thing. That’s the soft Left, inasmuch as those are the kind of people who call themselves “soft Left” or don’t object to other people doing so; they’re good people, they do a lot of useful stuff. But that doesn’t answer the question of what makes them “soft Left” as distinct from the “hard Left”.

Park that for a moment while we look at point 4. When I joined the Labour Party in 2015 I understood that a lot of people had been members for some time, and that quite a lot of them weren’t as keen on Jeremy Corbyn as I was; he got the votes of 49.6% of existing party members in the first round, admittedly, but that is less than half. Still, if you put together 49.6% of existing members and all the people like me who had joined since the election, you’d surely have a faction substantial enough to dominate the party, or at the very least to take the lead on a ‘first among equals’ basis, graciously sharing power with pre-existing factions. The hard-core Blairites might be hard to win round, but the soft Left would be up for it, surely – we’d been their junior partners so many times, after all, it was only fair…

Laugh? I nearly cried. What actually happened was that the Corbynite Left dominated a few particularly moribund local parties by sheer weight of numbers – helped along in one or two cases by the organising ability of pre-existing Left factions – and got repulsed everywhere else, systematically, repeatedly, relentlessly, until-we-gave-up-and-went-away-ily. We never got much chance to work as “first among equals”, or as second or third among equals for that matter.

What happened? Speaking as a member of a local group of ‘Corbyn supporters’ (yes, an informal, under-the-radar group of supporters of the current manifesto and the elected leader, that was us), I think we didn’t reckon with two things, one organisational and one cultural. The organisational point was that, while there were large numbers of left-leaning people joining the party, nobody had any way of finding out who they were or how to contact them – nobody, that is, except existing office-holders, and they certainly weren’t sharing the information around. (If we’re ever in this position again we need to think hard, and quickly, about ways round this one.)

The cultural point is more relevant here: we simply didn’t know what we were up against. We thought – well, I thought – that the people in charge of local parties in the 2010s were, broadly, “soft Left”, municipal variety: people who shared our basic principles but were less likely to talk about issues like imperialism, and more willing to think in terms of “half a loaf”, “the art of the possible”, “getting things done for working people” and so forth. I also thought that existing office-holders would recognise the sheer weight of numbers of the pro-Corbyn faction – not to mention that it was our leader who was leading the party – and… well, let us have a go.

What only dawned on me much later was that there was a commitment much more important than those “soft Left” political positions, which took precedence over them and sometimes seemed to displace them completely: the commitment to keep things going pretty much as they were, with pretty much the same people in pretty much the same positions (or, ideally, progressing to more senior positions). The existing in-group’s self-perpetuation was the absolute, non-negotiable top priority; anyone who threatened to interrupt it was a Trot, and a menace. That’s not to say that everyone involved actually was a Trot in party-card terms – or that anyone was, necessarily. But then, on the other side there was only a minority who were positively committed to kicking the Trots (or the “Trots”), or saw it in political terms at all. What united everyone was seeing it as a necessity: if they were in, we were out, and we would need to stay that way. I eventually realised, in short, that for them we would never be part of the conversation – we were what they needed to scrape off their shoes before the conversation could start.

As for distinguishing between points 3. and 4. – “hard Left or soft Left?” vs “Trot or Trot-basher?” – this history shows why it’s hard to do; or rather, this history makes it hard to do. Within the party, it would be absurd to define the “hard Left” without any reference to Jeremy Corbyn – which is to say, to name the “hard Left” is to invoke the leader of an insurgency within the party which was beaten back and ultimately defeated, largely by dogged refusal to budge on the part of existing office-holders. That in turn means that any debate between “soft Left” and “hard Left” is over before it begins: if group A has power and group B doesn’t, and power is both the thing that A most cares about and the one thing that B absolutely can’t be allowed to have, what are A and B going to have to say to each other?

This is also the context within which the heightened levels of polarisation referred to above – which make it harder to accommodate policy differences on the basis of shared principles – play out. Spelt out like this, it seems like a glimpse of the blindingly obvious: there’s been a civil war inside the Labour Party, in which one faction is now massively dominating the other – how could that not lead to higher levels of polarisation? I think it’s worth overtly taking account of it, all the same. And – let’s be clear – I’m not just observing that heightened polarisation as a sociologist; I’m conscious that I am very much in it. My only consolation is that this also applies to everyone who cares in some way about the Labour Party, which surely accounts for almost everyone on the Left in Britain. What happened in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, and between 2019 and the present, isn’t something anyone on the Left can be neutral about, it seems to me – and, a side once taken, it’s hard not to be a bit mistrustful and impatient with those on the other side. Shame, but until the war’s over it’s hard to know what else to expect. (It seems like a confession of weakness to say that my judgment is influenced by recent history, but I think it’s better seen as simple honesty. We can only do anything in the present moment, after all – and this present moment is, still, very much in the shadow of 2015-19.)

So I’m sceptical when Jonn Elledge claims to adopt the Mercutio position (“A plague on both your houses!”):

My politics has been almost entirely consistent. I want a Labour government; I just hate the Labour leadership.

Neat, but it won’t really do. As I said earlier on, where you fit in politics is “where you want to fit and try to fit” – and “what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting”. When the options are as limited as in this case – when it really is a case of being either for or against something – this is all the clearer. Where you fit on the Left – in a country where the Left is dominated by the Labour Party, in a period where the Labour Party has been split down the middle – is a matter of where you stood during that split: whether you were for or against the Corbynite attempt to transform the Labour movement and win power on a social democratic platform. And that’s verifiable, particularly if you’ve got any kind of public footprint: what did you say in 2015? 2017? 2019? What did you do? Who did you do it with?

There were only two sides – still are, when you look at it. “Soft Left” isn’t one of them. The label of “soft Left” is pretty meaningless at the best of times – which is to say, it’s defined primarily as “on the Left but not actually hard Left” and secondarily by the combination of issues that people who identify with it bring along. It only makes any sense at all when Left politics is relatively unpolarised, making it possible for there to be productive traffic between “hard Left” and “Left but not hard Left”. At a time of heightened polarisation – when the options are “pro-Corbyn” and “anti-Corbyn”, “is hard Left” and “hates the hard Left’s guts” – there’s really no room for “soft Left”.

I think his attachment to the idea of a “soft Left” helps explain Elledge’s recent New Statesman piece where he sets out all the great things the Starmer leadership would be able to do in government, before conceding that it might not do any of them. At least, it helps explain why that piece was so irritating. A “soft Left” government, if we define “soft Left” in policy terms – a government with portraits of Robin Cook and Jon Cruddas on its wall – would certainly do the things Elledge talks about: planning reform, rapprochement with Europe, revised fiscal rules, bring it on. But… well, so what? It wasn’t the “soft Left” that won the 2020 leadership election; come to that, it wasn’t the “soft Left” that Corbynites to a small extent tried (and to a large extent failed) to oust from their positions in the party.

Even when Elledge is conceding that he might be wrong, he shows no awareness of why he’s wrong:

it must be at least possible that the cynics are right, this isn’t an electoral strategy and Starmer’s Labour is exactly as gutless and unambitious as it seems.

Lurking here is the conviction that the Starmer leadership is itself “soft left”; that, at worst, we’re facing the prospect of principled – albeit “soft” – left-wing government whose key personnel are unfortunately lacking in courage and ambition. Actually, the Starmer leadership has made it very clear where it stands on a whole range of issues, and in the process has made some breaks with Labour orthodoxy that I’d certainly characterise as ambitious, even brave.

Once again: the soft Left isn’t here. If it’s the soft Left you want to support, think again – or at the very least, take a hard look at the people you currently are supporting. Labour has been split down the middle since 2015; there are and were only two sides in that split, and one of them was and is victorious – and those are the people who are going to be running the government. The fact that the next Labour government is in the future doesn’t mean we can treat it as a complete fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not saying, just saying

1. Not One Of Us

There’s an odd sort of family resemblance between prejudice, bullying and gaslighting. Sandi Toksvig summed it up once, talking about sexist expectations around having children – if you don’t have children you’re not fulfilling your biological destiny, but if you do have kids you should give up your job or else you’re a heartless career woman, but if you do stay at home you’re making yourself dependent on a man so you’re betraying generations of feminists…

There’s no right answer – it’s all double standards and double-binds. The point of going down one of these lines of questioning isn’t to find anything out but to be the one asking the questions and judging the acceptability of the answers. Bullying works the same way: bullies don’t want answers, they want to ask questions that victims can’t answer (or not without making matters worse for themselves). This is the case up and down the scale of sophistication – whether the question ostensibly being asked is “Why are you hitting yourself?” or “The following social media posts have been flagged as problematic. Do you have any comment?”.

Prejudice against outgroups, is, among other things, a form of bullying: one way you know you’re being treated differently is when the questions you’re being asked have no right answer – because the underlying question is: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”. And there’s no answer to that. What makes it particularly difficult to deal with is that, as well as being expressed through the medium of bullying and gaslighting, prejudice itself is very often gaslit. In a society where everyone’s, formally, equal, it clearly isn’t OK to put members of outgroups on the spot and ask whether they’re “one of them”, so it’s generally seen as something that doesn’t happen… until it does. After which, it’s seen as something that doesn’t happen, again… until it does, again.

Now: what happens when you become aware of this enormous, society-scale double standard – as some people, for obvious reasons, will do sooner than others? It’s a realisation you can’t go back from. From that point on, you’ve got to assume that prejudice (against your group or others) is a factor, even when everyone’s denying it; even when it looks as if they’re right to deny it. When you start to think about it, denying racism or sexism is just the kind of thing a racist or sexist would do – and a setting with no apparent racism or sexism is just one where nobody’s openly exhibited racism or sexism… yet.

There’s no way to deny the logic of this position – on the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence that society at all levels is saturated with a whole variety of prejudices, and less than keen on acknowledging them. It’s not a comfortable outlook, though. Just to get through the day, you need to be able to put this awareness to one side and assume good faith and neutrality from the people you actually deal with, even when you know that sooner or later the neutrality they’re professing will be disproved by their actions – sooner or later you’ll be gaslit. Until that moment comes (again), you need to remain innocent in the teeth of experience, if only for your own peace of mind. This means parking your righteous anger at the state of things pretty much indefinitely – or else calling people out more or less at random, which wouldn’t be great for your social life – but that’s not the worst thing in the world; you can live without righteous anger.

The only other possibility, and one that lets you hold on the righteous anger, is to treat the ubiquity of prejudice as the big deal it indubitably is, but do so selectively: assume good faith, give people a pass (and yourself a break) apart from the people who have aroused your suspicions in some other way, and unload your anger on them. This is certainly more comfortable than the state of generalised paranoia you’d end up with if you assumed prejudice from everybody you encounter, but it isn’t any more rational; if anything, it risks using the reality of prejudice to validate – and intensify – your personal dislikes. It also, ironically, reproduces the self-contradictory, gaslighting quality of prejudice itself. You only have suspicion to go on, so – unless you’ve picked your audience very carefully – you’ll have to talk about your targets as if they deserve as much good faith and interpretive charity as anyone else, while letting it be known that they do in fact represent the distilled essence of prejudice in human form.

2. …and everybody hates Tottenham

And so to Daniel Harris’s Graun article last Thursday on antisemitism and football. Caveat: I don’t really follow football, or know very much about it – think John Thomson’s Fast Show middle-class football supporter. But we’ll see how we go.

Harris makes a number of points, some of which I even agreed with. I certainly agree that football fans calling each other “Yids” (and worse) is Not OK. However, Harris overcomplicates this issue (in my view) by treating it as a problem of fans’ attitudes and beliefs, which leads him to insist on differentiating (racist) language from those attitudes and beliefs, rather than treating the language as the problem. (This in turn leads him to propose a wholesale re-education effort, with fans having to read literature on different varieties of prejudice and answer questions before they can buy a season ticket. It’s one way to sort out the problem of overcrowding at the home end, I guess.)

Thus:

while as fans our antipathy to everyone who is not “us” mainly constitutes harmless fun … sometimes it doesn’t.

I’m not convinced by the ‘harmless fun’ argument – the argument that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred. On a podcast I heard recently, Simon Mayo said that he’d brought up his kids to follow Spurs, but also to stay seated when someone shouted “Stand up if you hate the Arsenal!”. Maybe you deeply, sincerely want the team to lose, but does that have to go with hating the people who support them?

Tottenham … [are] labelled a Jewish club by rival fans and targeted with antisemitism. As such, hatred for “the Yids” proves loyalty in an environment which fosters competitiveness in that aspect. Unwittingly, Tottenham fans then became part of the problem by “reclaiming” the “Yids” moniker and applying it to themselves

First Spurs are (collectively) labelled as “Yids” because of the club’s historic association with the Jewish community; then the collective ingenuity of rival fans – taking advantage of the assumption that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred – mines the aggressive possibilities of that nickname, not hesitating to go there (for every tasteless and offensive value of ‘there’); then Spurs fans endorse the nickname by claiming to own the identity and be proud of it, no doubt reasoning that it’s all right when REDACTED REDACTED THIS POST IS BORDERLINE ALREADY HAVE YOU GOT A DEATH WISH OR SOMETHING (internal ed.) Ahem. It’s all fun and games; it’s all banter! And, following this logic, Harris stresses that it is – in fact – not just banter:

Jews are asked to believe that no one lustily shouting an antisemitic insult enjoys it on that basis – itself insulting

According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2.4% of British people – about one in 40 – profess multiple antisemitic beliefs, which seems like a decent proxy for being the kind of person who would enjoy shouting antisemitic insults. On that basis, what Jews (and the rest of us) are being “asked to believe” is that the rival fans mouthing off about ‘Yids’ are thinking about Tottenham Hotspur FC and its fans – and not about Jews in general – in about 39 cases out of 40. Even if you double that 2.4% figure, on the assumption that the prospect of supporting Spurs attracts a really disproportionate number of antisemites, the language would be being used ‘innocently’ 19 times out of 20. Statistically this seems fairly believable to me, and I can’t see how asking anyone to believe it would be ‘insulting’.

But this all misses a larger point. The really important thing that Jews are being asked to believe, in this case, is that an antisemitic insult is OK if it is just bants – that hatred is OK for as long is it’s just football hatred. (Hence Harris’s rather unconvincing attempt to demonstrate that it’s more than banter.) This, to me, puts an unacceptable burden on the people hearing the racist insults. The point is about the prevalence (and acceptance) of antisemitic language, not the prevalence of individual antisemites. There’s no need to prove, or even to raise the suspicion, that the people using antisemitic language really are antisemites; if antisemitic language is a problem, it’s a problem whether it’s being used by Nigel Farage or the Archbishop of Canterbury. And if somebody shouts something that uses racist language and sounds insulting, it doesn’t really matter whether they think it’s a racist insult or not.

3. Hate is all around

Harris would argue that I’m underestimating those “individual antisemites” and the threat they pose:

Antisemitism … is present and rising. Communal institutions are protected by professional and lay security, while in Jewish schools kids practise hiding in case they’re attacked by armed invaders seeking their murder.

But here again I’m not sure Harris’s approach is correct. I know that far-Right vandalism of Jewish religious and community institutions is a reality, but “armed invaders seeking their murder”? I remember a Jewish friend telling a group of us that his kids’ school had stepped up security after 9/11, and that there was a sense of waiting “for the other shoe to drop”; I don’t think it ever did. Googling “jewish school” “attack” site:uk brought back news stories on a number of Jewish schools – in Auckland, in Baku, in Toulouse – but none in Britain. Are kids really doing safety drills for something that’s never happened in this country (and hopefully never will)? The question isn’t whether people are scared but whether they have reasons to be scared – which is to say, reasons over and above a background assumption of the ubiquity of antisemitism.

The WhatsApp conversations of the Ashburton Army, a prominent Arsenal supporter group, were riddled with antisemitism … Though I wasn’t surprised when I heard about them because to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising, when I saw them I was staggered by their harrowing specificity, blasé ferocity and mind-boggling abundance

Staggered but not surprised, because “to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising” – it’s always there, even when it’s not there. Unlike Jews at football matches, who are never (visibly) there, even when they are there:

because, for reasons of community, most of the UK’s 270,000 Jewish population tend to live in or near big cities, most clubs have few, if any, Jewish supporters, while at the game Jews tend to go incognito, often for reasons of safety.

Incognito? How many Jews are Orthodox enough in their observances to be visibly Jewish, while also being relaxed enough to go to football matches on a Saturday? Unless he means something else by ‘go[ing] incognito’ – ‘not displaying flags or banners bearing the Star of David’, perhaps (I’m guessing here). But if that’s the case, you really do have to take into account the fact that that emblem is generally seen as the emblem of the State of Israel.

4. Another country

Which brings us neatly to what Harris describes as “Israel-related antisemitism”.

it’s worth acknowledging a view curiously absent from the discourse whenever non-Jews debate the existential legitimacy of the world’s lone Jewish state: Israel exists because the Holocaust forced the world to accept finally the centuries’ worth of evidence proving it could not be trusted to refrain from annihilating its Jews. Whether these debates are antisemitic per se can be argued, but their deployment in the service of antisemitism cannot. Broadly speaking, they are found on the political left wing

For Harris the Holocaust proved that, whatever the appearances, in the long run the rulers of the Gentile world are so many Hamans, simply waiting for the right moment to annihilate their Jewish populations – and in agreeing to the creation of the state of Israel, those rulers accepted the charge. This in turn makes “the existential legitimacy of the world’s lone Jewish state” a live and personal issue, for Harris and by extension for any Jew: if its existential legitimacy was brought into question, what would stand in the way of challenging the existence of the world’s lone Jewish state, and Jews’ only permanent security with it? Any threat to the continuing viability of the state of Israel, on this basis, is an indirect threat to all Jews – and is inherently antisemitic. Which is probably the way to understand that odd conclusion, that debates about Israel – debates that go beyond its current political situation to question the basis on which it was founded – might be legitimate in the abstract, but that they are being deployed in the service of antisemitism, on the Left.

In the Ashburton Army group, Holocaust-related antisemitism was directly linked to Israel-related antisemitism, but the latter trope also stands alone and in my view clearly exists in football. It happened in Qatar during the World Cup, has been an issue at Celtic and with the Scotland national team, frequently follows when a club communicates with its Jewish fans, and there are players and nations who refuse to play against or shake hands with Israelis – but no one else.

What’s at stake in the first linked example is political opposition to Israel, possibly rising to anti-Zionism: not antisemitism, unless (like Harris, apparently) you define the existence of Israel in its current form as essential to the survival of Jews worldwide. What’s interesting here is that the example behind the second link – a Tweet about Passover being answered with messages about Palestine – similarly derives from anti-Zionism, but clearly is antisemitic, in its disrespect for Judaism and its use of ordinary Jews as a proxy target for Israel. It would be far more constructive for Harris to distinguish these two things from each other than to lump them together. (As for that last minatory gesture at people who protest in actions against Israel but no one else, leave it out. Campaigning against the state of Israel is either within the legitimate range of politics or it isn’t, and if it is – as currently it is – then you can’t draw any adverse inferences from somebody engaging in it.)

Polling showed persuasively that the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Jews believed Jeremy Corbyn to be antisemitic

A survey of British Jews carried out by Survation in December 2017 found that 62% of them intended to vote for the Conservatives and 15% for Labour; the national polling averages at the time were 40% and 42% respectively. In March 2018 Luciana Berger (a Labour MP) publicly questioned Jeremy Corbyn’s endorsement of the Freedom for Humanity mural; in July 2018, Margaret Hodge (a Labour MP), with the protection of parliamentary privilege, called Corbyn an antisemite to his face. In September 2018, Survation polled the Jewish members of their survey panel and found that 85% of them thought that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite. (I wrote about that poll here.)

The idea that ‘antisemite’ was a label that could reasonably be applied to Corbyn was very much in the air in September 2018 (and later); given that a large majority of British Jews weren’t intending to vote for Labour, it’s not surprising that a large majority of British Jews were willing to endorse it. (Nor was Jewish disaffection from Labour the product of Corbyn’s leadership; the paper linked above makes clear that it predated Corbyn by several years.) What is surprising is that widespread belief itself – or, if not an outright ‘belief’, that widespread acceptance that there was no smoke without fire, so it wasn’t exactly that Corbyn was an antisemite but that he might be, or could reasonably be suspected of being, or needed to reassure people that he wasn’t an antisemite. It’s a decidedly odd charge to lay against a politician with Jewish allies and supporters, who campaigned against a local council’s attempt to bulldoze a Jewish cemetery and was an invited guest (also in 2018) at a Passover seder. But it’s not so odd if you’re using ‘antisemitism’ to mean ‘anti-Zionism’ – or if you’re identifying Corbyn and Corbyn supporters as your political opponent and loading them up with all the guilt of societal antisemitism. While also giving them the benefit of the doubt, of course:

In 2017, a Corbyn banner was displayed at Anfield and the Oh Jeremy Corbyn song … was aired by Liverpool fans during a football match in December 2019. I’m confident those involved did not intend to make Jews feel uncomfortable and were instead supporting Corbyn for his anti-establishment defiance in a city eager for a left-wing government. But given the confrontational nature of football crowds and the community’s well-publicised fear at the time – Luciana Berger, the former MP for Liverpool Wavertree, left Labour because of antisemitism at both national and local level – these were disquieting developments for me and other Jewish matchgoers.

Good old Liverpool fans with their left-wing anti-establishment loyalties, nothing dodgy going on there – it’s just that they were also ‘confrontational’ and didn’t care how they might exacerbate ‘the [Jewish] community’s well-publicised fear’, making it all a bit ‘disquieting’. At least, it would be if we weren’t confident that Liverpool fans aren’t antisemitic – which we are, so there’s nothing to worry about. Although, then again… football crowd, Luciana Berger, it makes you think… I’ll just exit from this infinite loop by noting that the only time I’ve heard “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” sung at a sports ground it was at a Radiohead concert at the Old Trafford cricket ground, with Thom Yorke – whose view on the BDS movement is not positive – playing along on guitar. I wonder if Daniel Harris would have found that disquieting, too.

This ‘not saying, just saying‘ routine is wearily familiar when it comes to allegations of left-wing antisemitism. Here’s James Bloodworth from back in 2015:

While I genuinely believe that Corbyn does not have an antisemitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do; and his excuses for doing so do not stand up.

Say what? If you’re absolving him of antisemitism, what does he then need to find excuses for?

I’ve never heard a coherent explanation of this argument (and I’ve seen it advanced many times). English libel law is a scary thing, but I don’t think everyone arguing like this was, or is, just covering their own back; I genuinely believe (if he’ll pardon the expression) that James Bloodworth genuinely believed the first half of his sentence. Unfortunately, he also genuinely believed the second half, which flatly contradicts the first half. Similarly, Harris seems simultaneously to believe that those Liverpool fans were motivated purely by their positive enthusiasm for Corbyn, and that they have questions to answer about their possible antisemitic motives – which he doesn’t believe they had, but worries that they might have had, although he’s confident [continues ad infinitum].  Ultimately, the trouble with this mindset is that you end up gaslighting yourself.

5. What to do about all this?

So, what to do about all this? Well, discrimination is defeated with clarity and policy

Let’s try for a bit of clarity first, and maybe build policy on that. We could start by defining antisemitism, following the OED, as “prejudice, hostility, or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds”; or, following me, as “hostility towards Jews, considering Jews as fundamentally and inherently different from non-Jews”; or else, following Brian Klug, as “a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are”.

The Klug definition seems hard to improve on – the word ‘grounds’ in the OED definition is unfortunate, suggesting that there might actually be a religious, cultural or ethnic basis for antisemitism, while my attempt at a definition doesn’t cover situations where Jews are seen as alien but otherwise normal (“got nothing against them, just think people should stick to their own kind”). If we ask whether it’s antisemitic for Arsenal supporters to sing about “gassing the Jews”, or for followers of Man U to respond to a “Happy Passover” tweet with “Free Palestine”, Klug’s definition clearly gives the right – affirmative – answer in both cases. (You don’t make a joke of the Holocaust unless you see its victims and their survivors and descendants as less than entirely human; you don’t conflate Judaism with Zionism unless you see every Jew as a Zionist.)

However, Klug’s definition would also give the right answer to the question of whether it’s antisemitic to regret the establishment of the State of Israel and seek justice for the victims of the Nakba and their survivors and descendants; or for a politician to endorse the cause of people who seek justice for Palestine; or for a group of football fans to sing a chant in support of a politician whose political positions include endorsing the cause of people who seek justice for Palestine, in a city one of whose MPs has publicly disagreed with that politician. The answer to that second group of questions would be No, of course – which is why that definition isn’t going to be adopted any time soon by people who see the state of Israel as the last line of defence for Jews globally, and use anti-Zionists as a lightning-rod for their anger at all the antisemitism in the world. The rest of us may find it useful, though.

Sixteen points high and falling

What’s happening with the polls?

I’m glad you asked. This. This is happening with the polls:

That’s a bit of a ski-slope on the right, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, it started high. Only a couple of months ago it was up in the… low 20s? Can that be right?

OK, back up a bit. This chart covers the period from the beginning of December 2021 to the 20th of April 2023. The red line, plotted against the left-hand axis, represents the Labour Party’s polling average, with each point calculated up to and including a poll taken on the date on the X axis (or in a period ending on that date). The red mountain, plotted against the right-hand axis, represents Labour’s lead over the Tories in each of those polls; if you squint you can see a submerged blue ice floe at the very start of the chart, representing a brief period when Labour’s average poll lead was negative (i.e. the Tories were ahead). Both of these series are averaged over 14 days – which is to say, the figure against any given date is the average of any and all polls taken on (or ending on) that day and the 13 previous days: the figures for the 17th of April, for example, are averages of all polls from the 4th to 17th. The left and right axes are scaled 1:1; 0% on the right axis is matched with 40% on the left axis, for no reason other than convenience.

So, what are we looking at? First of all, yes, that is a bit of a ski-slope on the right. But let’s do it in order. The first thing you see here, in the leftmost ‘peak’ (circa the end of January 2022), is the discrediting of Boris Johnson. As the ‘Partygate’ scandal unfolded, Labour’s support rose from the high 30%s to the very high 30%s or even 40% – an undramatic improvement which nevertheless resulted in 5-6% leads over the Tories. This is worth pausing over, as it’s the result of the current leadership’s determination to take votes directly from the Tories. In 2017, a campaigning approach focused on mobilising non-voters and hegemonising the centre-left meant that Labour’s share of the (intended) vote could rise from 25% to 40% without the Tory share going below 42%; the current approach doesn’t run that risk. It does, however, run the risk of amplifying the volatility of the system, with every 1% movement towards Labour improving Labour’s lead by 2%. (And poll leads, like share prices, can go down as well as up.)

Anyway, after that first peak things settled down a bit; Labour polled a bit below 40% or a bit above, with round about a 5% lead over the Tories, from February through to July. In July, Boris Johnson resigned, Labour’s polling moved decisively above 40% and the poll lead started hitting 10%. (I don’t know what was behind that dip at the beginning of August.)

Then Liz Truss was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and whoa, Nelly: Labour’s polling climbs to 53% (up 11%) and their lead over the Tories, following the same pattern as before, climbs to 31% (up 21% – which isn’t twice 11, but it’s close). But all good things must come to an end: by November 2022, Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister, and Labour’s polling average has settled back down to 47-8%, with a lead over the Tories of 20-22%.

Yes, we’re in the sunlit uplands of the Twenty Point Lead – and there we stay, give or take a point or two, from mid-November 2022 through to the end of February ’23. After that, though, comes another phase, and that phase we are still very much in: not to put too fine a point on it, it’s the ski-slope phase. In the month and a half since the end of February, Labour’s average support has fallen by 3% (from 48% to 45%), and their average poll lead has (predictably) fallen by 6%, from 22% to 16%. Update: on 20th April those two averages dipped below 45% and below 16% respectively, for the first time since Liz Truss was PM.

Like all the other movements on this chart, this drift back to the Tories can be explained fairly exhaustively by two factors. One is the public perception of the Prime Minister, which in Sunak’s case was initially fairly unfavourable – after the debacle of the Truss premiership and Sunak’s anointment by default – but has improved over time, and (at least for now) is continuing to improve. The other is electoral gravity, a.k.a. reversion to the mean: it’s not a frequent occurrence for Labour to be polling above 45% or the Tories below 30%, and when something like that does happen the smart money is on it not happening for much longer.

What the factors driving Labour’s polling don’t seem to include is anything contributed by Labour. The Labour leadership isn’t making the weather when it comes to the party’s popularity; moreover, they haven’t done so for some time. Quite some time…

[wobbly dissolve effect]

What’s this? It’s the same kind of chart, with the same kind of scale (1:1 between polling average and average lead, zero matched to 40%), for the period September 2015 to March 2018.

There are three main periods. In the first, Labour’s polling under new leader Jeremy Corbyn starts low, then gets lower – 32% in September 2015, touching 25% in April 2017. The Tories’ lead over Labour starts at 8% and grows at a bit less than the 2x rate we’d expect, peaking at 20%. (The area with the bite taken out of it represents the period of the Brexit referendum, when some Tory support went to UKIP, and the Tory lead over Labour fell without Labour doing any better.) In April 2017 Theresa May called an election; between then and the election itself, in an extraordinary and memorable short campaign, Labour’s support (as registered in opinion polls) grew from 25% to 36% – a remarkable gain in support, which actually understated Labour’s support in the ballot box. (While Labour’s polling rose by 11%, incidentally, the Tories’ lead over Labour shrank by… 12%: almost none of that gain in support corresponded directly to a loss of support by the Tories.)

After the election, of course, the polls turned round for Labour, although in retrospect low 40%s and a 5% lead don’t look like that much of a honeymoon. It also wasn’t that long a honeymoon. The attacks on the leadership from inside the party may have quietened down for a while after the 2017 election, but the people attacking from outside never stopped – and in the Skripal poisoning they finally found a way of making Corbyn look ridiculous (or dangerous) that actually stuck.

This chart takes us through to December 2019. Between March 2018 and March 2019, Labour’s polling slides from around 40% to 33%, and the Tory lead over Labour grows from 3% to 7%; so far from gaining 2% poll lead for every 1% of support lost, the Tories aren’t even gaining from Labour’s lost support at a rate of 1 for 1. (The Greens and Lib Dems between them put on about 5% in those twelve months, possibly because the Brexit storm clouds were already gathering.) The European elections of 2019 see polling briefly go completely crazy, with support for both major parties collapsing; the Tories’ support collapses further and faster than Labour’s, leading to the bizarre sight of Labour taking a lead over the Tories while polling in the low 20%s. Labour’s polling settles down around 25% and, following the defenestration of Theresa May in July, the Tories’ recovers, giving them a solid 10% lead. In November an election is called. Labour’s polling recovers during a slightly less extraordinary (and very cold) short campaign, but not by enough: up 8% instead of 11%, and without the eventual understatement of votes cast. Strikingly, even less of the support recovered is pulled back from the Tories than in 2017: Labour begins the campaign polling an average of 25% with a 12% Tory lead, and finishes it polling 33%… with a 10% Tory lead. (The Lib Dems and Greens began the campaign polling around 20% combined, and ended it on 10-15% (14% on the day).)

But what is this? The bad times ended in December 2019, surely? Well, not quite. Trivia question for future politics quizzes: under which Labour leader did the Tories poll a 23-point lead in April 2020? The answer is, of course, Keir Starmer. To be fair, from that moment on Labour’s support rises steadily from 28% to 38% (10%), and the Tories’ lead falls from 23% to 5% (18%, very nearly double). In other words, the very first thing Keir Starmer did as leader was pull back support from the Tories, in the way that Corbyn had never done even when Labour were polling in the 40%s. (Given the lack of any correlation under Corbyn between rises in Labour support and loss of support by the Tories, those 8-10% of voters who came back to Labour for Starmer are a bit of a puzzle. I mean, where had they been hiding? One can’t help wondering how many of them had been supporting the Tories in 2019 and even in 2017 – and how differently those elections might have gone if they’d been won over earlier.) After that, though, the chart shows Labour’s support bimbling around in the mid- to high 30%s with a Tory lead of 5-10%, barring a period of neck-and-neck polling in December 2020 (which you may remember as Disastrous Pandemic Mismanagement Month). The leadership seem unable to land a glove on Johnson’s Tory government – or even present themselves convincingly as a more desirable alternative – until November 2021. At which point Partygate erupts, the British press turn on the government, and shenanigans ensue.

And that’s where we came in.

What these charts tell us is that there have only been three periods in the last five and a half years when there’s been a sustained rise in Labour’s support both in absolute terms and relative to the Tories: the 2017 election, the election of Keir Starmer and the election of Liz Truss. (Borderline cases are the 2019 election (which improved Labour’s polling in absolute terms but not relative to the Tories) and the removal of Boris Johnson (which improved Labour’s polling by 7% and their relative position by 15%, but did so over a period of eight months); including them wouldn’t change the argument, though.) Simply listing these events demonstrates how little – under the current leadership – Labour’s popularity has depended on anything the party’s representatives have done: instead, events in the Tory Party and its associated media seem to exert a tidal pull on levels of support for the Tories, with Labour support following as the default alternative. The election of Keir Starmer as leader might seem like an exception, but it really isn’t: the event that made the difference there wasn’t anything Starmer did or said but how he was received by the political-media establishment, and in particular how he was hailed as a decisive break from Corbyn.

As for where we are now, the most recent of these vote shifts, after an unsustainable peak (and the removal of an unsustainable Liz Truss) took Labour from averaging 42% and a 10-point lead to averaging 47% and a 20-point lead. (47-42=5, 20-10=10 – same ratio as ever.) It’s that lead which is now unwinding, with the current averages standing at or slightly below 45% and 16% respectively.

Will the Labour vote share (and lead) go lower? Almost certainly. Will it go a lot lower? Depends what you mean by ‘a lot’, but I can’t see anything militating against Labour support falling back to somewhere around 40%. Which might be OK on the day of an election, but could be disastrous going into an election – particularly for a party which has limited capacity to build its own support and has pinned its hopes on the Tories self-destructing.

On that topic, here’s one final chart.

Crowded and unreadable, I admit, but it’s not as if you’re interested in individual data points. All you really need to know is that the dotted lines mark election campaigns in the course of which Labour’s polling was pretty much flat (up a bit in 2005, down a bit in 2015); the dashed lines are campaigns during which Labour’s polling either went down a little (3-4% in 2010) or went down a lot (8-10% in both 1997 and 2001); and the solid lines are the ones where I went out canvassing with some friends. (Hey, what can I tell you? We knocked on a lot of doors.) The serious points here are that Labour’s polling went up by 6-8% during the 2019 campaign and 8-10% in 2017; that this was very unusual, and can reasonably be related to other things that were unusual about the party in those campaigns; and that, if we’re not going there again, past form says that we’re very unlikely to put on support during the short campaign, and pretty likely to lose it.

Now, you might say that another unusual factor is that there was plenty of room for improvement in the polls on both those occasions, and that this could also be related to the then leadership; you might also say that, when it comes to winning elections, Labour is better off starting in the mid-50%s and losing 8% than starting below 30% and gaining the same amount. All I’d say to that is that polling in the mid-50%s isn’t to be had for the asking – and we don’t want to go into the next election campaign on 42% (say) and lose 8% out of that.

At the moment, glancing back at that asymmetrical red mountain, I’d say that when the music stops and the ski-slope levels out, Labour are likely to be polling in the 38-42% region, with at best a low-single-figure lead over the Tories. And if that’s how we go into the short campaign (whenever it is), I don’t hold out much hope of a Labour majority.

[Update: after this post was published Labour’s polling average and their average lead continued to fall, hitting a low of 43.5% and 14% respectively around the end of April. They then recovered steadily, and are currently (20th May) standing at 45% and 17%. Maybe 45% – and, say, a 15% lead over the Tories – is the new floor. We shall see.]

Thousands or more

(Cross-posted from 52 Folk Songs)

At a traditional singing event I attended recently, there was a discussion of how to “pass on the baton” – i.e. how to recruit enough younger people to keep what we do going beyond the next ten years or so. It’s a real issue, at least if the attendance at that event was anything to go by; there were people there without any grey in their hair, but not very many. At one point someone even addressed me as “young man”; I’m 62 (although, to be fair, I do have a full head of hair, and the light was quite bad).

But what is “what we do” – what is it that we want to keep going, and to share with younger people? A singaround I go to may provide some pointers. In a three-hour afternoon session, in a room above a pub, anywhere from 10 to 20 people sing at least two songs each (usually three), mostly unaccompanied but a few with guitar. Songs often have a chorus or a refrain – and people will join in anywhere that seems appropriate – but an unaccompanied solo will also be warmly received. Judging from the last couple of sessions, around half the songs are traditional, with most of the rest dating back to the Folk Revival of the 1960s and 70s, and between half and two-thirds are songs I know (which says a bit about how much of the repertoire is shared with other singarounds), although often in an unfamiliar version (which says a bit about how much work singers are willing to do to keep it interesting).

Let’s say that’s “what we do”; that’s what we want to preserve. What’s good about it? Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, or preserve, or enact – and if there is, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good? Alternatively, we could start from the position that singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, and then ask what it is about them that makes them good. In other words, if singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?

The singaround repertoire

The repertoire itself is the most obvious candidate for X. How does it shape up?

Traditional songs without singarounds? In terms of literal survival – in terms of not actually being lost to future generations – traditional songs certainly don’t need singarounds; in fact they don’t need any help from anyone, with the possible exception of a few conscientious librarians and database administrators. As someone pointed out in the discussion the other weekend, before the Revival began a lot of them had been lying around unperformed and unrecorded – or else performed only in social settings somewhere down an unnumbered road – for half a century or more. If organised sessions and concerts where you can hear traditional songs stopped tomorrow, the researchers of a future Revival wouldn’t need to do the rounds of the inns and sheep sheds; they wouldn’t even need to go down to the stacks and blow the dust off volumes of Sharp and Child and Bronson. They’d just need to find Walter Pardon and Sheila Stewart and Sam Larner on YouTube and press Play.

Revival singer-songwriter material without singarounds? There are plenty of non-traditional songs that I’ve heard at singarounds but never heard anywhere else – “Icarus”, “Queen of Waters”, “Dust to Dust”, “Rolling Home”… In fact there are songwriters whose songs I’ve only ever heard at singarounds – Graeme Miles, Keith Marsden, Roger Watson, Bill Caddick… I think it’s undeniable that singarounds are keeping some of this material in circulation – but the job could be done just as well by concert performances, YouTube uploads and artist Websites like this one and this one (creaky as that second one is).

So both halves of the singaround repertoire (as I know it) could manage without singarounds. In another sense, though, singarounds are a way of keeping the repertoire alive – at least, if by ‘alive’ we mean something stronger than ‘not extinct yet’. Something about a song is lost if it’s only heard in recordings and concert performances, especially if those recordings and performances are a long way from the sound of an unaccompanied singer. When you take a song and layer on rock guitar, or grime beats, or even a wholly-acoustic Bellowhead-style knees-up, to some extent the song stops being a song in its own right and becomes material, a contributory element of an overall sound. And that in turn means that keeping the song alive becomes a job for the professionals – there’s no way for you, the listener, to be part of the process, except perhaps by forming a band. To really play a part, you’d need to strip the song back to its essentials – the words, the tune, the voice – and keep the song alive by, well, singing it.

Singarounds without traditional songs – or Revival songs? I don’t see why not. Really, there’s no reason why singarounds couldn’t do what they do just as well with – and for – a completely different repertoire. I had a curious illustration of this once in Cornwall. I’d gone to a singaround on the Monday night (there was a lovely “Curraghs of Kildare”, I remember), and assumed the singing part of the holiday was over. In a pub on the Wednesday lunchtime, I noticed a group of men of advancing years in a side room, and realised that they were having a bit of a sing; I think they were celebrating one of the group’s retirement. I drifted over and joined in the odd chorus. After a while I got chatting with one of the singers, who showed me their song list – which was very long and included quite a few songs I knew to listen to (“Wooden Heart”, “My Grandfather’s Clock”, “The Three Bells”), but very few I could sing along to, and none that I could have led. Some things were familiar but different: they did “Lamorna” in stage-Cornish (“‘Er said, I know ‘ee now”) and without any percussion on the “wet”s. (I’d come from Manchester (home of Albert Square and indeed Pomona) but kept my trap shut.) They even sang one song that I’d heard at the Monday night singaround – “Goodnight Irene” – with the same tune and chorus but without any of the same verses.

Conclusion: any singaround needs a repertoire – and once it’s got one, it keeps that repertoire alive in a way that nothing else can do. But there’s no rule that says that the repertoire has to be mostly traditional, or even partly traditional. And it’s possible that, as time goes on, some singarounds will fall silent, taking their specific repertoires with them; I can only really speak about (and for) the singarounds I know as a singer.

The singing (solo)

High-quality singing without singarounds? Not a problem, obviously – although it should be said that there aren’t that many other ways to hear a really good singer sitting in the same room and on the same level as you.

Singarounds without high-quality singing? Would singarounds still be singarounds – would they be worth keeping on with – if there were no really good singers? It all depends what you mean by ‘really good’. A performance can be technically perfect and soulless, sounding more like an audition than a contribution to a social occasion. Equally, there are performances with great communicative power – songs that come across as moving, gripping, horrifying or hilarious; songs where the singer is transported and so are you – despite the odd missed high note or fumbled lyric.

Conclusion: singarounds and ‘good singing’ in a Cardiff Singer Of The World sense don’t necessarily go together. But ‘good singing’ in that second sense – singing seriously, with commitment and passion – is one of the things that singarounds are all about, because they’re all about investment in the repertoire – and that’s how you sing if you’re personally invested in what you’re singing.

The singing (together)

One way of identifying a really good singaround is from the quality of the choruses and harmonies. Not that everyone involved needs to be musically trained; some of the best harmonising comes from people just listening to one another and finding a note that nobody else is singing. What is essential is that people know the songs – or rather, that they know some of the songs and that they’re willing to pick up the ones they don’t know.

Chorus and harmony singing without singarounds? Not really a problem – there are choirs, there are shape note classes – although in those, more structured, settings the material is less likely to be familiar, and I imagine that the “find a gap and jump in” approach will often be frowned on.

Singarounds without choruses and harmonies? Obviously they exist; the online song sessions we’ve all been going to for the last three years are almost all harmony-deprived. Even in person, a session may not feature much or any joining in; low numbers and poor acoustics may militate against it. But a singaround where joining in on choruses and refrains was actually discouraged – as a matter of policy, not practicality – would be a strange thing.

Conclusion: chorus singing is a natural part of a singaround, where by ‘chorus singing’ I mean

1. knowing what to sing to songs you know
2. working out what to sing to songs you don’t know, and
3. doing both of these on the basis of a judgment of what sounds right at the time, rather than having a preconceived melody or harmony line

Again, it’s a way of singing that goes with investment in the repertoire – the kind of investment that makes you want to lend your voice to the collective effort of singing it; and that goes for the parts of the repertoire you don’t know as well as the parts you do.

The singing (by everybody)

At all the singarounds I know, anyone who doesn’t have a song will be welcome to stay and listen. But, at all the singarounds I know, everyone who’s there will be asked if they do have a song – and anyone who sings will be asked to sing again when their turn comes round.

Singing in turn without singarounds?

Now you’re asking. I can’t think of another social setting where everyone present is given the opportunity to sing a song or lead a chorus – perhaps the kind of party where people are literally asked to give their ‘party piece’, but when did you last go to one of those?

Singarounds without singing in turn?

Again, this is hard to imagine. True, there are ‘jump in’ singarounds – where you get the next song by, in effect, taking it – but I haven’t been to one in a long time. Besides, even there the assumption is that everyone will get a chance to sing, or at least that everyone will have the chance to take a chance to sing. A singaround where you know in advance that only some of those present will be singing would be a very different proposition – more like a concert, with performers and an audience.

What makes a singaround?

The essentials seem to be

• an opportunity for everyone to sing (and be listened to)
• a repertoire with a familiar core and an open boundary
• singers who are invested in the repertoire and interested in learning more of it
• …and (at least) some of whom sing well, (at least) in terms of passion and intensity

So a singaround is an informal social gathering of people who like hearing singing done well and want to do it well; who enjoy listening to one another and singing together; and who like hearing familiar songs and learning new ones. It’s a social grouping which embodies a practice: a practice of singing based on commitment to the songs you’re singing and their delivery, a commitment which in turn is grounded in a substantial but finite repertoire. What the singaround’s repertoire is will vary from one to another, but it will be broadly definable in each case – which is to say, anyone who visits a singaround more than once will be able to tell more or less what they can expect, whether it’s “Sweet Lemany” or “Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime”, “Young Waters” or “A Mon Like Thee”. Each singaround’s repertoire is perpetuated through practice, song by song and session by session – and lines are drawn informally, over time, dictating the kind of thing ‘we’ do and don’t sing.

What do you do? Why do you do it?

Singarounds, then, are a social practice which have a symbiotic relationship with their repertoire, mediated by individual singers’ investment in that repertoire. If you want to keep a repertoire of songs alive – keep the songs in people’s throats and minds – there’s nothing like them.

In terms of the questions I started with –

Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, and if so, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good?

If singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, what it is about them that makes them good? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?

this isn’t a very satisfactory conclusion, although it has the merit of simplicity: not only is the valuable X that singarounds are doing not being done anywhere else, it’s the same X as the X that makes singarounds what they are. From “how do we get new people interested in singarounds?” I’ve gone all the way to “how do we get new people interested in a particular kind of social practice, based on equal participation among a group of people committed to a particular repertoire, and currently found mainly in singarounds?”.

But that formulation does at least suggest a possible answer:

1. The singarounds themselves are what we want to keep going – not ‘social singing’ generally, not ‘folk clubs’ (or ‘folk’ anything, necessarily), not even the traditional-centred repertoire itself, but singarounds as a social practice.
2. Singarounds have a basic, undeniable value as a meeting-place for people who know and care about their repertoire and as a shared practice ensuring that repertoire stays alive and keeps being sung.
3. Off nights apart, that value is obvious to anyone who goes to a singaround and already cares about – or is mildly interested in – that singaround’s repertoire.

So what we need is:

1. Singarounds that are working well and welcoming newcomers
2. A continuing supply of newcomers, i.e. people who are at least mildly interested in the repertoire[s] of our singarounds and have a chance to experience them

I was a young man…

A lot of people, especially people who got into folk when they were young themselves, tend to assume that the challenge we face is attracting young people. That’s part of the challenge, but only part of it, and probably the most intractable part – how can we get young people to spend time with a lot of old people? how can we get young people to prefer folksong to whatever it is they’re into now? Since it’s rare for anyone to succeed in doing either of those things, answers tend to be speculative; the discussion is liable to drift off into talking about “Wellerman” and TikTok and social media and socialising online and do we all have to be in the same place, maybe that’s just what we’re used to…

But actually we don’t need – wait, let me be careful how I phrase this – we don’t necessarily need young people rather than older people. What we need is (point 2 above) a continuing supply of newcomers. To take a slightly absurd worst-case scenario, if everyone stopped going to singarounds when they turned 75, singarounds could still remain viable indefinitely by recruiting enough people who had just turned 70. The age distribution in singarounds does tend to skew old, of course – that’s where we started; indeed, the fact that the singaround I referred to at the beginning happens on a weekday afternoon tells its own story. There are good reasons for people to be worried about whether the baton is going to get passed; numbers are going to start depleting fairly steeply at the upper end of the age range before too long. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve got to start appealing to young people specifically – it’s a long way down from 70-75 to 18-24; it just means that we should appeal to as wide an age range as possible. I was recently at a singaround where about one in three of the singers were in their twenties (and a really good sing it was too – I was hoarse by halfway through) so I know it’s not impossible to get younger people interested, but it may well not be the easiest age range to pitch to; it may be that, at least in periods when folk isn’t in fashion, there’s an affinity between folk and middle age. (There’s an awful lot of death in those old songs; I lost my parents in my forties, and let’s just say that Lemony Snicket was right.) Perhaps it’s  40-somethings we should be worrying about rather than under-25s. Better, in any case, to keep the door as wide open as we can and not focus on – but also not exclude – any age group, as far as possible. Which certainly means not holding all our singarounds on weekday afternoons, and probably means not holding all of them in pubs. (I don’t think I’ve ever been to a singaround and been stone cold sober at the end of it, but it might be worth a try.)

Whether we need to do any work on the repertoire to avoid repelling newcomers is another question. I tend to think that what’s come down to us is ours to learn and sing, not to edit (at least, not deliberately), and that if we’re offended by elements of a song’s lyrics we should just not sing it. Admittedly sometimes it’s offensive to hear a song, let alone to be surrounded by people happily joining in with it; I sympathise, but rather than draw up a list of Songs To Walk Out On I’d advise patience and not judging singers, or singarounds, too hastily. (I vividly remember the look on a friend of mine’s face when he came into a singaround midway through an enthusiastic performance of The Chinee Bum Boat Man (about which all I’ll say is that it’s not quite as bad as it sounds). But he stayed, and he came back the next time. It was a good session.)

I also think that when it comes to traditional songs potentially offensive material is very hard to avoid. Rape, for example, is treated as a routine plot element in songs as varied as The Bonny Hind (tragedy), Knight William (romantic comedy) and Tam Lin (supernatural weirdness); in John Blunt the prospect of rape is played for laughs. People do draw lines, in point of fact, even with traditional songs. (I was once at a singaround where a singer who usually did the same three or four songs branched out by singing Bonnie Susie Cleland. We clapped, and then someone asked him, Why on earth did you learn that? Harsh but fair.) But even if you confine yourself to learning songs where all the sex is consensual and nobody gets burned at the stake, in most singarounds you’re going to hear songs about people (mainly men) behaving very badly indeed; songs like that are part of the repertoire, and often they’re really good songs. You have to come to your own accommodation: appreciate songs like that as horror stories, or failing that just enjoy the singing – or else take deep breaths and wait till the song’s over. (That was certainly the reaction at one Zoom singaround where I did Andrew Rose. I swallowed spit at one point and had to cough, and somebody said afterwards they’d thought the song was making me gag… too. Sorry about that.) In the nature of the singaround, there’ll be something completely different along in a minute or two.

As for point 2. up there, and the work of ensuring that there is a continuing supply of people (of all age ranges) with at least a vague interest in and awareness of English traditional songs, I guess we should all do what we can – although I’m aware that most of us can’t do a lot. The only thing I’d say is that we should reverse the order of the terms “English traditional songs”: we should focus on the qualities of the songs themselves rather than promoting them on the basis of being traditional, and not focus on the ‘English’ part at all if we can help it (beyond the fact that most of the songs we’re talking about are in English). There’s a way of thinking – expressed forcefully here – to the effect that “the English” have lost something that Celtic and migrant nationalities have hung on to, and that we need to make English folk music popular again in order to get it back (or possibly that we need to get it back again in order to make English folk music popular). I agree that it’s a damn shame that more people aren’t singing the old songs, and that traditional music gets more high-level backing in Ireland (and even in Scotland) than it does in England, but I don’t think we should be tempted to go any further than that. At the end of the day English nationalism is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to disentangle from British nationalism and the British Empire. A ground-up, subaltern English nationalism would have its own cultural forms – and might well embrace a lot of what we do in singarounds – but we’ve no idea what a subaltern English nationalism would look like, and we certainly can’t just make one up. Little bit of politics, my name’s Benedict Anderson, goodnight.

In conclusion, while folkies do a lot of different things (attending concerts, buying albums…), I think singarounds are a particularly pure and focused form of that thing we do; and the best way to hand it on to future generations in good order is to keep doing that thing we do, attracting people who are likely to be attracted and as far as possible not shutting anyone out. Let’s keep the singarounds going and keep them as open to newcomers as possible – and let’s keep the songs out there, pinging the cultural radar from time to time. Good luck to everyone who’s doing anything to extend the reach of traditional songs in English, with all their strangeness and beauty and horror, whether the songs are from England, Scotland, Ireland, America or Australia; whether they’re performing the songs with kids, teaching them to students or just finding some way to put them in front of adults born since the 1970s.

(Most of them won’t like it, of course. Most people never do. Fortunately, we don’t need most people, just enough.)

The moving finger

The Guardian reported yesterday, following an investigation by the Daily Telegraph, that

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin

although later in the article the changes are described as being made by “Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company”, the latter being the owners of Dahl’s rights. This is significant, because in 2021 the RDSC was bought out by Netflix. According to a statement from the RDSC, the review was initiated by Puffin and themselves in 2020, before the buyout. However, Netflix’s announcement at the time of the acquisition states that it “builds on the partnership we started three years ago” (i.e. 2018) “to create a slate of animated TV series”; this is going to include “a series based on the world of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (with Taika Waititi, Thor fans!). All in all, it seems likely that Netflix wanted to square off anything that might have created bad press for their forthcoming Dahl properties.

Bad press meaning what, though? There’s no suggestion (that I’ve seen) that the books were marred by the anti-Black racism seen in the characterisation of the original Oompa Loompas (more on whom anon), or by Dahl’s personal antisemitism. I haven’t got access to the original Telegraph feature, but here are some of the changes listed in the (many) articles which have been written about it.

Before	After
fat (Augustus Gloop)	enormous
ugly and beastly (Mrs Twit)	beastly
“Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat And tremendously flabby at that,”	“Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,”
“Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire And dry as a bone, only drier.”	“Aunt Spiker was much of the same And deserves half of the blame.”
most formidable female (Mrs Trunchbull)	most formidable woman
“So I shipped them all over here – every man, woman and child in the Oompa Loompa tribe!”	“So, they all agreed to come over – each and every Oompa Loompa.”
“I wish I was a grown-up,” Nigel said. “I’d knock her flat.”	“I wish I was a grown-up,” Nigel said. “I’d give her a right talking to.”
“You’ve gone white as a sheet!”	“You’ve gone still as a statue!”
Bunce, the little pot-bellied dwarf	Bunce

We are no longer told that witches disguise themselves as women so successfully that a witch might be “working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” without anyone knowing; instead, the hypothetical undercover witch might be “working as a top scientist or running a business”, a change which inadvertently cranks up the paranoia in an already rather queasy conceit – not only are witches everywhere, they’re running everything! The grandmother in The Witches doesn’t tell the narrator that if he tries to pull off a woman’s wig to see if she’s a witch he’ll get into terrible trouble, but reminds him rather sententiously that women can wear wigs for many reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with them doing so. Elsewhere, Mike Teavee’s eighteen cap guns have been written out of the text and edited out of the illustrations; Matilda reads Jane Austen and John Steinbeck instead of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling; the Smallest Fox in Fantastic Mr Fox expresses his appreciation of cider before, rather than after, taking a drink; and all descriptions of people as “fat” or “ugly” (or “female”) have been removed or replaced. There are a lot of changes, and it’s hard to identify any overall rationale to them, unless it’s to remove anything that a liberal parent in 2023 might be embarrassed or reluctant to read out.

But I’m less concerned with the reason for the changes than with the fact that changes have been made, and a lot of them; the new, post-2021 edition of any of these books won’t be the same text as the pre-2021 edition. This isn’t the kind of thing we would want happening to Jane Austen (or Joseph Conrad); as a matter of fact it isn’t the kind of thing that happens to other early- and mid-twentieth century authors – Dorothy L. Sayers or Josephine Tey, for example – and if anyone tried it on we can easily imagine the reaction. By extension it seems like a bad thing to be happening to Roald Dahl. Doesn’t it?

Counter-Argument 1: “Oh come on, these are kids’ stories…!”

Not buying that one. You can keep your hands off Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild and Alan Garner, and in a very real sense wasn’t J. R. R. Tolkien…

CA 2: “Oh come on, you’re not putting Esio Trot and George’s Marvellous Medicine alongside The Hobbit?”

I’m saying whatever kids read is important enough to take seriously as literature – or at least, if there is a literature/trash threshold, it’s well below the Esio Trot level. And you don’t rewrite books that you take seriously as literature.

CA 3: “This is old news, though – and authors themselves aren’t precious about their text, not when there are good reasons not to be. Notoriously, And Then There Were None originally had a different title, but it was renamed – presumably with Agatha Christie’s approval – within two months. Dahl himself rewrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after approaches from the NAACP, which was concerned about the racist portrayal of the original Oompa Loompas.”

Yes, and it’s very much to his credit. The point when Roald Dahl died, however, is the point beyond which Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could no longer be revised by its author.

CA 4: “Authorial intent? Seriously? Are you telling me the words on the page of even the first edition of one of Dahl’s books were identical to the words he originally wrote? Have you any idea how many stages a book like that goes through, how many people get to look at it and make – sorry, suggest – changes? When it comes to mass-market publishing, the author is dead and has been for some time. By the same token, it’s not unusual for the text of a book to get a few tweaks when it’s reprinted.”

Fair enough, but the author Roald Dahl – like (say) J.R.R. Tolkien but unlike (say) J.K. Rowling – is also dead in the sense of being dead. Authors may not write every word that comes out under their name, but for anything that appears in their lifetime, we can assume that they have at least approved it. Past that point, we know for certain that they haven’t. (And what we’re looking at here is more than a few tweaks.)

CA 5: “So that’s it, the text is sacrosanct and should be preserved for evermore? What’s next, should kids be reading Little Black Sambo?”

I’m not saying any existing text should be preserved for evermore. Philip Pullman’s comment on the current brouhaha is instructive:

“If it does offend us, let him go out of print. That’s what I’d say. Read Phil Earle, SF Said, Frances Hardinge, Michael Morpurgo, Malorie Blackman. Read Mini Grey, Helen Cooper, Jacqueline Wilson, Beverley Naidoo. Read all these wonderful authors who are writing today who don’t get as much of a look-in because of the massive commercial gravity of people like Roald Dahl.”

If it offends us, let it go – there are plenty of other authors. It’s harsh, but I think it’s correct. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, some of which – sadly – prominently feature an African character for whom ‘problematic’ is barely an adequate word. You won’t find those books in the kids’ section of bookshops now, and I find it difficult to regret that, as fond as my memories of some of them are. J. P. Martin’s Uncle books are both masterpieces of unhinged inventiveness and unabashed hymns to the nobility and refinement of the hugely wealthy; personally I’d love to see them back in print, but I’m not sure where they could be shelved.

So no, I’m not saying everything should be preserved, or even everything that I liked. Dahl’s books have qualities that you won’t find in Jacqueline Wilson or Michael Morpurgo, but so do the Uncle books, so do the Doctor Dolittle books, so does The Wind on the Moon, so does The Log of the Ark… Times change, readers change; new books appear, old books disappear, and sometimes with good reason. But what I am saying is that any existing text that is preserved should be preserved unchanged.

CA 6: “It isn’t a big deal, though – it’s not government censorship, just a private company making an informed decision about what will and won’t sell.”

I don’t think anyone’s said that it’s government censorship. What it is, is a capitalist business rewriting children’s literature on the basis of what will and won’t sell. I think that is a big deal, even if some of the changes are hard to object to.

CA 7: “You said it yourself – you don’t actually object to the changes. There’s a reason for that – the changes are basically correct. They’re in line with the way that contemporary sensibilities have developed. Sure, there’s a minority who just want everything to stay the same, and we can have a bit of sympathy for them – we all have fond memories of the books we read as kids, after all – but most people realise that things have to change. Readers didn’t want racially-caricatured Oompa Loompas by 1971, so the book was changed – and today’s readers don’t want colonialism and body-shaming, so the book’s changing again.”

This is begging the question – to be precise, begging two different questions. We don’t know that the changes that have been made are appropriate to changing contemporary sensibilities. We know that Puffin and RDSW – Penguin Random House and Netflix – brought in an agency called Inclusive Minds to do a sensitivity reading of the Dahl corpus, and that these are the changes that resulted. In other words, we can be fairly sure that changes appropriate to changing sensibilities were what they were trying to achieve, but whether these actual changes do that is anybody’s guess; maybe it would be truer to today’s sensibilities to make a lot more changes (or just not reprint the books any more). Alternatively, maybe the mark to hit would actually involve making a lot fewer changes – perhaps take out the bit about women working as secretaries and leave it at that – although in that scenario Puffin and Netflix might not feel that Inclusive Minds had given value for money.

In any case, there’s a more important question here, which is simply the question of whether any changes should be made to a published book after its author’s death – and this counter-argument does nothing to answer that.

CA 8: “But what kids read is important – you said so yourself. Perhaps adult readers can skate over Josephine Tey’s right-wing politics or Dorothy Sayers’ casual antisemitism, but we don’t expect children to have that level of sophistication. Roald Dahl’s books are full of potentially hurtful allusions to appearance and body shape, and much else that could inculcate unthinking prejudices in child readers.”

Roald Dahl’s books are full of a number of things, including spite and cruelty; it’s worth remembering that he was not, in many ways, a nice guy. More importantly, the remorseless nastiness of some of his characters (and of what happens to them) is of a piece with the heightened, fairytale quality of his world-building – you should see what happens to people in some of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. Dahl’s narrators label people fat and ugly for the same reason that Miss Trunchbull calls her pupils ‘midgets’ – not despite the offence it could cause but because it’s offensive.

I think we should recognise the work that cruelty and spite – and dark themes and characters generally – can do, in children’s as well as adult literature; and, as far as imbibing prejudice from the page is concerned, we should probably have more trust in children’s reading ability. That said, if any of Dahl’s books (as he left them) turn out on repeat viewing to be really toxic, there’s always the option of not reprinting them. Otherwise, hey, publisher, leave that text alone – just like Dorothy L. Sayers, just like J.R.R. Tolkien.

CA 9: “You’re paying an awful lot of attention to what’s basically yet another anti-“woke” culture-war feature in the Telegraph. Shouldn’t we resist this scaremongering, the same way we resist all right-wing attempts to drum up a moral panic?”

If we should ignore culture-war journalism, then we should ignore this story – as in, not react to it at all: if we should avoid getting dragged into culture wars, then we should avoid getting dragged into this one. (How many demonstrations in favour of vaccination have you seen, or in favour of the World Economic Forum? Not our circus, not our monkeys.)

More specifically, if we think there’s an issue here we should take our own position on whatever that issue actually is, rather than look at what the Right’s saying and take the opposite position. Calling the Telegraph piece a culture-war feature is fair enough, but it doesn’t mean the analysis in it is necessarily wrong, let alone that the Left should be rallying to the defence of [check notes] Bertelsmann and Netflix.

At the end of the day, the rewrites – which is to say, the fact that they’re happening at all – are bad news for children’s literature. I hope all concerned take note of the reaction in the press – which has been substantial and global – and draw their horns in sharpish.